• Why an "autobiogeography?" 

Back in 1997, when I first made a website, inspired by my then-colleague Jesse Prinz, I found that there were lots of other people named "Eric Brown" on the burgeoning web, and I decided to make a "Guide to Eric Browns on the Web" part of my site. I hit on a little "autobiogeography" as a jocular way of tying myself to particular locations that would distinguish me from the other Eric Browns. 

But I don't think the idea is entirely a joke. Who we are and how we live are conditioned by where we live. 

We feel this, most of us, as a sense of belonging to places where we have lived, and for some of us, as a sense of displacement when we are elsewhere. Despite the fact that I was eager to leave my hometown as a teenager, I have come to welcome this sense of belonging. But I am less comfortable with the way our sense of belonging spreads from a place to the people with whom we share this place. When I was a kid, I took pride in a range of heroic figures as Ohioans: astronauts John Glenn and Neil Armstrong, sports stars John Havlicek, Jack Nicklaus, and Pete Rose, inventors Thomas Edison and Orville and Wilbur Wright, etc. (The Ohio Presidents not so much. And it would be a while before I would know of Art Tatum, Gloria Steinem, Toni Morrison, and Willard Van Orman Quine, even though the first two were from my hometown of Toledo.) Such local pride is presumably harmless, but what about the attitudes corresponding to displacement, when they extend from other places to the people living there, the outsiders?  

• Why would anyone call Toledo, Ohio, "The Glass Capital of the World?"

Largely because of Edward Drummond Libbey and Michael Joseph Owens. 

Libbey moved the New England Glass Company from East Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Toledo in 1888 and renamed it the Libbey Glass Company. You've almost certainly drunk from a Libbey-made glass; they contain a script L mark in the bottom.

Owens, who worked for the Libbey Glass Company, invented the first fully automatic bottle-blowing machine. Together he and Libbey founded the Owens Bottle Machine Company in 1903, which acquired the Illinois Glass Co. in 1929 and became Owens-Illinois, an enormous producer of glass containers (and subsequently other kinds of containers, such as corrugated paper boxes). In 1935, the Libbey Glass Company became the Libbey Glass Division of Owens-Illinois. But they separated again in 1993, when the Libbey Glass Division was spun off as Libbey, Inc.  

Edward Libbey and Michael Owens also started a third major glass-making enterprise. After acquiring the rights to a plate-glass manufacturing process, they founded the Libbey-Owens Sheet Glass Company in 1916. This firm made the first safety glass for cars in 1928, which won it a contract to make windshields for Ford's Model A and subsequently led to a merger with the Edward Ford Plate Glass Company. So goes the origin of the Libbey-Owens-Ford Glass Company. 

A fourth major Toledo-based glass-making interest postdates Libbey and Owens but still owes something to them, since it was formed as a collaboration by, and then as an independent offshoot from, Owens-Illinois and Corning Glass Works in the 1930s. Owens Corning became famous for its fiberglass insulation ("Put your house in the pink!"). 

"LOF" left Toledo in 1986 when it became part of the Pilkington Group, and its name faded entirely when Nippon Sheet Glass took over in 2006. But Libbey, O-I, and Owens Corning are still there. I'm not sure that the city deserves to be called "The Glass Capital of the World," or whether it ever really did. But its firms have made a lot of glass, and they have left a stamp on Toledo, alongside the Jeep production which was headquartered there and some auto-related firms such as Dana and Champion. 

There is one other way in which Edward Drummond Libbey left a mark on Toledo. He founded the Toledo Art Museum, which has a remarkably good collection and a stunning glass pavilion for its outstanding collection of glass art. It is well worth a visit if you're driving by Toledo on the Ohio Turnpike or through it on I-75. You might even want to grab lunch at Packo's.

• What's the deal with all the Wikipedia links?

Wikipedia's a great source for basic information about people and places. It's not so great for questions of interpretation and judgment. But Wikipedia is definitely one of the better things about the internet. 

• Okay, but a bare "autobiogeography" does not really say much about who a person is. Isn't it an awfully reductive account "about me?" 

I could say a bit more. In Winter 2009, as the older folks were flooding onto Facebook, its users began posting notes with a list of "25 Things about Me." I enjoy memes, but rarely participate. This time, I decided to participate, though a bit cantankerously. I still think that what I wrote is true, though we've learned some things about Mario Batali that we didn't know then. Here, with apologies to LW, are "25" "Things" "About" "Me."

1 One obvious and unimportant thing about me is that I am 6'8" tall. 

1.1 I don't mind being asked about it. If I did mind, I'd be bothered a lot. 

1.2 Especially among African-Americans and Italians. 

1.21 I don't know why they ask more than others. 

2 Here's another bit of egocentric trivia, not entirely unrelated to the first: when I lived in Chicago, I played basketball regularly with Barack Obama. 

2.1 I suppose there's no need to say, "Yes, that Barack Obama." 

2.11 If I'd known he'd become President, I might have chatted with him more.

2.111 But probably not. 

2.1111 I have to remove my hearing aids for serious exercise, and that makes conversation difficult. 

3 My deafness is another obvious but unimportant thing about me. 

3.1 But it does have some embarrassing consequences.

3.11 If I don't know you very well, and even in some circumstances with those I do know well, I am very likely to guess wrong about what you are saying. 

3.12 This goes double if you don't sound like a Midwesterner, if you have a thick mustache, if you are not facing me, or if you are a low talker.

3.2 Adults regularly claim never to have noticed that I wear hearing aids on those occasions when it has become obvious (e.g., I have removed one to change a battery). 

3.21 Small children regularly ask about what's in my ears. 

4.1 Another cool celebrity interaction, this one very limited: Amy and I almost ran into Mario Batali in Mexico. 

4.11 He seemed to me larger than the two of us put together. 

4.12 He probably was.

4.131 Amy is petite.

4.1311 Amy is my wife.

4.2 Yet another celebrity sighting: once I was eating dinner with my in-laws, and Alfred Brendel was eating at the next table. 

4.3 I was also a couple of tables from Eddie Vedder at a Magic Slim and the Teardrops gig once, but who cares about Eddie Vedder? 

4.31 Batali and Brendel are geniuses.

5 Having wasted several of these notes mentioning celebrities, I am now casting about for other ways to indicate my inexplicably fond connection with the Zeitgeist.

6 Failing that, I will resort to less trivial notes that reveal my boringly old-fashioned preferences concerning narrative structure.

7.01 The setting of Act One is a suburb of Toledo, Ohio, called Sylvania. 

7.011 I was born in Cincinnati, but my family moved before my first birthday. 

7.1 Sylvania was a small town, then a few years shy of sprawl. 

7.2 So I could and did bicycle everywhere that mattered:

7.21 school 

7.211 all three of which were close,

7.212 though I did not often bicycle to Southview (the high school), since that would not have been cool,

7.213 despite the fact that it does not befit someone like me to worry about seeming uncool,

7.22 the gym 

7.221 at the JCC, where the Christmas day games were especially great, 

7.222 or at McCord (the junior high), where Stanley the janitor would let us in,

7.23 the ballfield 

7.231 at Sylvan (the elementary school),

7.232 at an empty lot near Ray O'Lenic's house, 

7.2321 which is probably not empty now,

7.23211 just like the once-empty lot opposite my house,

7.23212 which contained a great dirtbike racing course,

7.232121 including a great ramp, 

7.232122 but for which I never had a proper dirtbike,

7.233 or Memorial Field

7.2331 (yes, Sylvania complied with the federal regulation that American little league teams play their games at shrines for the war-dead),

7.24 the library, 

7.241 the memory of whose smell provokes special nostalgia, 

7.2411 which smell was destroyed by the remodeling in the 1990s,

7.2412 and to which smell I have found numerous cousins but no duplicates in other libraries and bookstores I have loved,

7.25 the pool 

7.251 (again at the "J"), 

7.26 and my friends' houses. 

7.3 Also, I used to believe that my mother knew everyone in Sylvania.

7.31 I was almost right. 

8 I can convey the most important fact about Act One by saying that my parents never missed 

8.11 a game, 

8.12 recital, 

8.13 play, 

8.14 school carnival, or 

8.15 parent-teacher conference.

8.2 They also designed our roadtrips with detours to see Civil War battlefields 

8.21 and some non-Civil War battlefields

8.211 such as Tippecanoe, Indiana,

8.22 and some non-battlefields

8.221 though I don't remember them as well.

8.3 Most impressively, Mom and Dad each sacrificed more than one weekend to ride a school bus for several hours, stay in a cheap motel, and serve as a chaperone and judge at a high school debate tournament. 

8.4 When I was young, I also went to countless games, meets, and such in which my sister and brother competed. 

8.41 I was a huge fan. 

8.42 I also retain the ability to be roused easily by any simulation of what the local high school pep bands could do with their versions of the Ohio State fight songs.

8.421 I also weep easily during the tear-jerking scenes of even mediocre movies

8.4211 if the soundtrack is on

8.4212 and especially if I am stuck in a plane.

8.42121 Something about the altitude.

8.5 We also went to the local high school football games, even though none of us performed on the team or in the marching band or on the cheerleading squad. 

9 Another important fact from Act One: my mother is intensely competitive. 

9.01 I was completely oblivious to this

9.02 until my brother pointed it out a couple of years ago. 

9.1 This explains a lot about my siblings and me. 

9.2 It never seemed odd then that I was always competing

9.21 in baseball, basketball, tennis, golf, math-league, science fairs, piano and double-bass recitals, quiz bowl, and debate, 

9.22 not to mention the hearts and euchre, horse and pick-up games, ping-pong and pool, kick-the-can and one-on-one Wiffle ball. 

9.3 With time, I've worked hard in the effort to take losing better, 

9.4 but I am very glad that I was raised to hate it.

10 I believe that the most important bit of luck one is subjected to is the luck of who one's parents are. 

10.01 If that goes well, everything else is easy. 

10.02 If that goes poorly, everything else is hard. 

10.1 I was extraordinarily lucky.

11 Act Two meanders a bit, 

11.01 with most of its scenes in 

11.011 Chicago, 

11.012 Pittsburgh, 

11.013 and St. Louis 

11.02 but many, many important scenes scattered here, there, and everywhere. 

11.1 I fear a full reckoning would be as exciting for others as a cheap music-video montage offered by a third-rate movie. 

11.2 But it was a blast to live. 

11.3 My sense of what is possible regularly shifted dramatically.

11.31 I was exploring a huge world outside of Sylvania,

11.32 and trying to figure out and become the person I wanted to be. 

11.4 Many of the new possibilities failed to destroy the charms of the old ones.

11.41 My mother had packed me a bologna-and-cheese sandwich in a brown bag every day for many years.

11.42 I now love countless foods I hadn't even heard of and couldn't have pronounced properly when I left Sylvania. 

11.421 (Many of them I still cannot pronounce properly.

11.4211 I am a Midwesterner.)

11.43 But I still love a bologna-and-cheese sandwich. 

11.431 And despite my increasing awareness of the reckless effects of the standard American's carnivorous diet, 

11.432 my love for encased meats is unabated,

11.4321 and I am very happy that St. Louis contains some fantastic, old-world sausage makers, such as 

11.43211 G&W,

11.43212 Piekutowski's,

11.43213 and Volpi.

11.5 Another piece of good fortune is that the people to whom I owe most of Act Two's new possibilities made them welcoming. 

11.51 Most of all I owe the woman I took to two proms at the end of Act One. 

11.511 I won't say I am surprised that she agreed to marry me. 

11.5111 By then, it was no surprise. 

11.512 But I am still surprised that she went to prom with me.

12 Act Three began not when I became the person I wanted to be but when what I wanted to be changed. 

12.1 In a very short period of time, Amy and I acquired new roles and lost any sense that we had training wheels. 

12.11 Amy passed her boards.

12.12 I received tenure. 

12.13 We had our first child.

12.2 So far, Act Three has been the most challenging 

12.21 and thus in some ways the most frustrating. 

12.3 But to this point it is also my favorite. 

• But how did you get interested in philosophy?

In high school, I was an avid debater, and the kind of debate I did—called "Lincoln-Douglas" debate—focused on evaluative propositions that encouraged philosophical argument. I also had a great social studies teacher who taught a one-semester introduction to philosophy, and I found myself drawn to philosophical novels. So by the time I started college, philosophy was among the concentrations I was considering. In my first year, one of my professors told me that I wrote like a philosopher, and while she might not have meant that as a compliment, it was useful. (She frequently offered up great advice, specifically tailored. She was an unusually attentive and concerned teacher.)   

• What's your favorite beverage?

That's a question I answered in a brief interview for the American Philosophical Association's blog about its membership. 

• What is philosophical research?

All researchers look for interesting questions or puzzles and seek to answer them. In all fields of knowledge, being good at research requires knowing enough, and being creative and attentive enough, to find good questions, and knowing enough, and being imaginative and hard-working enough, to find good answers. It also requires a willingness to fail, as the more interesting questions tend to be the hardest to answer. 

In philosophy, just about any question or puzzle is potentially fair game. If the question can be answered quickly and easily by some empirical research or simple testimony, we will pass on it. (We won't, however, pass on the questions about what makes a question empirically tractable, or what counts as good empirical research or testimony, or why and how good empirical research and testimony manage to answer the empirically tractable questions.) But some of the big questions that are not clearly answerable by empirical study are the bread and butter of philosophical research: questions about what really exists and how existing things relate to each other, questions about what we are and how we should live, and questions about how, if at all, we can come to know and perhaps to understand these things.

Most philosophers spend most of their time thinking about more delimited versions of these questions. I'm primarily an historian of philosophy, which means that most of my research most directly concerns what some past philosophers have said. But this historical, interpretive research is not divorced from more direct philosophical research. Our best answers to the best questions are identified only in relation to other possible answers and questions. Historical work contributes to our grasp of what the possible questions and answers are.

The methods of philosophical research are primarily thinking, reading, writing, and conversation. But its ultimate goal, despite how narrowly our research can be focused, is ambitious. I like Wilfrid Sellars' way of summing it up, on the first page of "Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man:"

The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term. Under 'things in the broadest sense' I include such radically different items as not only 'cabbages and kings', but numbers and duties, possibilities and finger snaps, aesthetic experience and death. To achieve success in philosophy would be, to use a contemporary turn of phrase, to 'know one's way around' with respect to all these things, not in that unreflective way in which the centipede of the story knew its way around before it faced the question, 'how do I walk?', but in that reflective way which means that no intellectual holds are barred.

• Why do you do philosophical research?

I do philosophical research because I love to do it and because it is a big part of my job. (I'm one of those lucky people who really loves [most of] my job.) Research is part of my job in three overlapping ways.

First, I work at a research university, and research universities exist to foster knowledge and understanding, on the grounds that knowledge and understanding are worth having. So it's part of my job to contribute to what we human beings know and understand. I do research on some particular questions just because we (I mean we human beings) don't yet have a satisfactory understanding of them and having a satisfactory understanding of them would be worth having. The questions I settle on count as "my research projects," and every academic at a research institution has at least one active "research project." Hiring and promotion at research universities depends primarily on the success of these research projects, as judged by the researchers' peers.

Second, my job involves a lot of teaching and advising of students, both undergraduate and graduate. Some of this teaching overlaps heavily with one or another of my research projects, but most does not. Research tends to be more specialized than most courses. Also, some of my teaching involves guiding students who are doing their own research projects. So I have to do a lot of reading, thinking, writing, and conversing to be an effective teacher and advisor, both in general and before most class-sessions and advising meetings.

Third, much research is collaborative, and I do a lot of research on some other questions to collaborate with other philosophers. Much of this collaboration takes the form of critique, as a tremendous amount of an academic's job is assessing the work of others—commenting (on work in progress), refereeing (submissions for publication), reviewing (already published material), and evaluating applications (for graduate admission, faculty hiring and promotion, and grant-giving). But some of the collaboration is more convivial and less stressful than this, as, say, in a reading group that explores some text together or at a conference where people are presenting their work in progress. I'm hardly alone in this, but I really enjoy these reading groups and conferences, as difficult as it can be to squeeze them into a long list of other commitments. 

• What about research that is useful? 

This is a hornet's nest of questions, really, but I want to divide them into two sets. First, you might worry that there is no point to any philosophical research, that it doesn't make any progress. Or you might worry that there is some point to philosophical research, but only for a few and not for society more generally. I think the first of these worries can be easily laid to rest, but the second needs some attention.

There are three broad ways in which philosophy has made and continues to make progress. First, sometimes philosophers in search of ways of answering certain questions find methods that work, and whole disciplines are spawned dedicated to the cultivation and practice of the working method over a particular domain of questions. The sciences— all of them—are outgrowths of philosophy, developed by philosophers. (I wouldn't give philosophers credit for technology, which of course is closely linked to the development of some sciences. But the prime movers in every science I know of would have called themselves and been called by others around them philosophers.)

Second, still thinking of philosophy as a shared enterprise, not far from the model we associate with mature science, philosophers have made progress by developing their accounts of how the world works and how we should live in it, to accommodate our changing sense of the basic facts that such accounts should accommodate. It is not as though the philosophical questions go away, and as our sense of the world has changed, so too we need changes in our philosophical reckoning. Of course, philosophers don't all converge on any one account in every detail, but that's okay. It is an ongoing process. Of course, too, not every change in "our sense of the world" has offered progress. But more than a few changes have. 

Last, we shouldn't think of philosophy merely as a shared enterprise. Every human being has a sense of how the world works and of how to live. These philosophies can be more or less reflective, more or less developed. Philosophy as a disciplinary practice offers individuals ways of making their philosophies more reflective and more developed. Understanding and wisdom are not the common results. But philosophical work can bring some clarity, some reduction in confusion, some stability of commitments. It can also bring some humility, some awareness of just how difficult it is to work out how the world works and how we should live. 

These responses to the first worry help a bit with the second, as well. I do worry that the benefits of philosophy are concentrated among those most gifted with the leisure to philosophize. Most human beings are not well positioned to appreciate the progress philosophy collectively makes or to make their own philosophical progress. There are, however, three ways in which the benefits of philosophy are shared, and in articulating them, I hope to stimulate ways of thinking about how we could do better at sharing them.      

First, the most robust way of sharing the benefits of philosophy is by doing philosophy with more people. We should do this. There should be more philosophy in school. (Some Wash U students formed a club called Think Tank that visits local elementary school students and engages the students in philosophical discussion about a story. More of this, please!) There should be more access to liberal arts education in which philosophy classes are a crucial component. And there should be more public philosophy, philosophical work that presupposes no disciplinary expertise to be understood. (Changes to the political economy could also make the leisure to philosophize more widely available.)

Even where we are not benefiting from philosophy by philosophizing, we can benefit from the work that philosophers have done, as that work has shaped the ordinary cultural tools we use to make sense of ourselves and our world. The benefits of philosophy trickle down, unlike the prosperity the rich gain from less progressive taxation, but these benefits are not widely appreciated. Perhaps, then, some of the public philosophy should make that clear. A public relations campaign of sorts might help.  

This p.r. campaign might spawn a bit more of the least robust way of sharing the benefits of philosophy, too. When I watch Olympic athletes, I don't often have the thought that I could have done that, or even that I wish I could do that. And yet I do often experience a strange sense of pride that there are human beings who can do that. (This feeling is more intense when the athlete is from my country, and even more intense if they are from my neck of the woods. Our patterns of identification have tribal tendencies.) I had a similar reaction to hearing about the solution to Fermat's last theorem. I had no hope of understanding the solution, but pride in the realization that someone had solved it. On a couple of occasions, I've had this sort of feeling while reading or hearing some philosophy. 

These most extreme examples of human achievement might make it easier, by their very extremity, to appreciate how human activity that is intrinsically valuable can be appreciated by and thus can benefit those who are not doing the activity and even those who cannot do the activity. Many if not all the intrinsic goods are not competitive but easily shared, but sometimes these goods are obscured by the trophies that often accompany them. 

The American culture is very good at appreciating the value of athletic excellence. Athletic endeavor is fully entrenched at every level of education, and the public relations campaign for athletics is vast. Even where the competitive trophies—the literal trophies and the gargantuan piles of cash—are impossible to miss, there remains an appreciation for core values of athletic endeavor that are shared. 

It is a pity that we are so good at doing this for goods of the body, and so bad at it for goods of the soul. 

• What is wrong with academic publishing?

Almost everything. 

There are strong rewards for publishing more and more, even if that involves breaking one long argument into many separate, publishable bits, and even if it means publishing the same idea many times. The rewards come primarily from hiring and promotion committees, who have to wade through piles and piles of dossiers and find it vastly easier to consider crude quantitative measures than to give careful thought to what is usually complicated academic work and is often work very far from the committee member's expertise. There are also strong rewards for publishing work that is widely recognized as great, but it takes a ton of work and luck to produce work that could be recognized as great and then to have it recognized as great. It's easier and safer to produce a lot of solid work and to promote it. That approach is guaranteed to earn some respect and might actually make it more likely that one or two of your projects are recognized as great.

In addition to those perverse incentives to "produce" more and more publications, there are essentially no rewards for refereeing academic work, and especially for refereeing especially well, with well-informed and carefully considered constructive criticism. A good referee just gets more refereeing to do. No one gets hired or promoted for their refereeing work. If you keep your refereeing anonymous, you cannot even get a footnote or an invitation out of it. 

I haven't even mentioned the profiteering and the demands on editors. 

The good news is that there are some powerful institutions--wealthy, elite universities--that could unilaterally make changes without paying any significant price for those changes, and could inspire others to follow. The bad news is that those institutions are not doing anything about the problems, despite how obvious they are.

• Do you have second thoughts about what you've published?

Sure, about almost all of it. I haven't yet come to reject a thesis I've argued for in print, though, except perhaps for a claim in "Knowing the Whole." That essay concerns Socrates' insistence in the Phaedrus that no one can seriously understand the nature of the soul without grasping the nature of the whole (270c1-2). I argue against Mary Louise Gill's contention that Socrates has "the whole environment" in mind and in favor of the old-fashioned suggestion that he has the whole cosmos in mind. I wish I'd given more attention to the possibility that he had the whole complex of soul and body in mind. When I heard Tushar Irani give a talk that touched on this passage, Dhananjay Jagannathan suggested this possibility and pointed to Charmides 156d-e. I think I just didn't think about the Charmides passage when I was writing my essay. Did none of the other scholars whose work I reviewed mention it? Maybe they did, and I brushed it off? I'm not sure. But it wouldn't be the first time that lots of pages are written about an interpretive question and all of them ignore a plainly relevant passage. 

• What is a "preliminary essay?" 

In most philosophy PhD programs, there is some requirement between a set of courses and the dissertation. Sometimes, that is an exam or two. Sometimes it is the submission of a portfolio of work. Sometimes it is an essay or two. At Chicago, in the 1990s, at least, students were required to submit and pass a "preliminary essay" between finishing coursework and starting the dissertation. You might think of it as akin to a master's thesis.

• Why do you teach?

I, like most teachers, teach because I really like to teach and really value teaching. And for many of us, especially at the university level, we got into teaching because we loved learning, and wanted to continue to learn while helping others to learn. 

It is a real blessing to be able to do work that you really enjoy and that you sincerely believe is valuable, but there are pitfalls in this vocation. 

For one, it is difficult to teach people who don't want to learn or who are distracted by other goals or problems, and there are unfortunately a large number of distracted people. This undercuts teaching at all levels, and it frustrates many teachers' desire to teach.  

For another, there are potential tensions between one's desire to learn and one's desire to teach. The more one learns, the harder it is to find students ready to learn alongside you. A gulf between the professor's research and their teaching can open up. To combat this, I keep refreshing my introductory courses, or sprinkle a little bit of research-related thoughts into these courses. But it can be tempting to put the teaching on repeat, to maximize time for research, especially if one finds it harder and harder to generate enthusiasm for learning in the classroom. (Another way of combating this is to withdraw from undergraduate teaching and to focus more on graduate courses, especially if one can build a "research center" with other faculty and graduate students dedicated to one's research niche. A lot of the restlessness and unhappiness of research academics is traceable to the frustrated desire for this sort of thing, as most of them trained in such research centers and do not work in one.)

Another set of pitfalls involves the economics of teaching. Although it is great to have a job that you love and value, it is not so easy to have a job that is undervalued by others, and this is very much the fate of too many teachers. Precisely because teachers typically find teaching rewarding, the people who hire teachers count on hiring committed teachers who don't have to be attracted to teaching by the paycheck. Even in research universities, where the pay is not always systematically bad for the professors, the remuneration schemes undervalue teaching. If universities were to reward the faculty for the learning they engender, they'd care much more about classroom and advising work and a lot less about most scholarly journal articles. But the status quo is that teaching awards get a reception and a one-time cash payment, whereas journal articles fetch permanent raises to salary, and teaching professors are on term-limited contracts, whereas research professors get the protections of tenure. Teaching is the sort of labor that markets undervalue, associated as it is with cooperative virtues of actually caring about other people. One can hope that with the decline of the patriarchy, markets will cease being irrational in a systematically unjust way and will perhaps even be seen as the limited tool they are.    

• What is your favorite class?

I like all my classes. I don't spend much time teaching material that does not interest me, and I usually mix into the syllabus some material that is new to me or that I don't think I've got a handle on, so that I am focused on learning, too. (After all, that is why I wanted to a college professor in the first place, so that I could continue to be a full-time student.) 

Of course, some classes go better than others. Sometimes I feel like I'm staying just enough in control of the material to be helpful without being so much in control of the material that I've squeezed the life out of it. And of course whether the class goes well or not has at least as much to do with the other people in the room as it does with me. The best classes have sufficiently many participants who are sufficiently engaged to raise the level of discussion in the room, which in turn raises everyone's level of attention and thinking. The weakest classes are dominated by people just trying to get credit for being there. 

• Why do you teach so much Plato?

I love teaching Plato. The writing is (usually) non-technical and approachable. The ideas come fast and furious. There is a commitment to inquiry and an openness to confusion and uncertainty. His dialogues are a great way into philosophy. In an interview with howstuffworks.com, I discussed this a little more.  

• What is Hellenistic philosophy?

"Hellenistic"—not to be confused with "Hellenic," which just means "Greek"—is the name scholars give to the period between the death of Alexander the Great, in 322 BCE, and Octavian's victory over Antony at Actium, in 31 BCE. That is, the "Hellenistic Age" is the period between the death of Alexander's Macedonian Empire and the birth of the Roman Principate. During this time, three great philosophical traditions developed.

First, Plato's Academy continued to flourish, but it turned skeptical, as Arcesilaus decided that the lesson of Plato's dialogues was to suspend judgment. Near the end of the Hellenistic Age, the Academy splintered, with some Academics (around Philo of Larissa) accepting belief in what seemed plausible, others (around Antiochus of Ascalon) becoming fully dogmatic believers in a synthesis of Platonic, Aristotelian, and Stoic doctrine, and some (around Aenesidemus) remaking themselves as fully skeptical followers of Pyrrho. After the dissolution of the Academy, there would continue to be followers of Plato, but they started calling themselves Platonists, and not Academics. But from the Hellenistic Academy, skepticism emerged. 

Second, a follower of Cynics who had spent time in the Academy, Zeno of Citium, developed his own distinctive outlook that attracted followers to him at the Painted Porch (Stoa Poikile) in the Athenian agora. These "Stoics" would become enormously influential in Rome, in late antique philosophy, and in several subsequent traditions.

Third, Epicurus developed a powerful philosophy of atomism and hedonism as an alternative to the Socratic approach to philosophy that was dominant in late fourth-century BCE Athens. Epicureanism can still seem strikingly modern, and is useful to keep in mind when you hear someone sketching broad contrasts betweens "the ancients" and "the moderns" in "Western" intellectual history. Some of the ancients were a lot more modern than some of the moderns.   

• Should I write an honors thesis?

If you're inclined to go to graduate school, then yes. This is a great opportunity to tackle an independent research project, and get some help learning how to do such a thing, from formulating the idea to revising the essay. If you're not planning to go to graduate school, you probably have a less urgent need for the skills specific to an honors thesis. You might have a topic that you'd like to explore, though, and this might be your best chance to explore that topic with all the resources your college and advisor provide. That's a powerful reason to undertake the project. If you're not headed to graduate school and you don't have a topic you're really itching to explore, then I'm not sure it will repay the effort that such an undertaking requires. If you're not really interested in spending hundreds of hours over the course of almost a full year working to craft one well-researched research project, then you shouldn't do it. A half-assed honors thesis is one of the world's more depressing things, as it amounts to a waste of a lot of time for at least two people. 

• What book(s) do you recommend for people who want to start studying philosophy?

This depends on your interests. (As usual, the best advice is tailored to the particular circumstances.) A lot of folks get hooked by Plato, and especially by Plato's Socratic dialogues. You might try the Euthyphro, Apology of Socrates, and Crito, in that order, to see whether they grab you. I've also found that a lot of students, especially those with a scientific bent, find Lucretius' On the Nature of Things to be a great way in. But of course, ancient texts are not the only good invitation to philosophy.

I don't spend a lot of time reading more general introductions to philosophy, so I'm not sure what to recommend if this is what you are looking for. I suspect that Simon Blackburn's Think and Thomas Nagel's What Does It All Mean? are worth looking at. I'm a big fan of the essays in Nagel's Mortal Questions, which are pretty accessible. I've heard from several people who were introduced to philosophy by Sophie's World by Jostein Gaardner, and I've also heard good things about a newer collection of introductory essays called Philosophy for Girls. 

Finally, the online journal Aeon has published several very good philosophical pieces in recent years that are geared toward general readers. You might go searching there. 

• What book(s) do you recommend for students of ancient Greek and Roman philosophy?

The primary texts, above all. The scholarship can be very useful in providing models of how to read and interpret, but be careful of forming views about the ancients on the basis of the scholarship. One needs to avoid being trapped by this or that scholarly approach to this or that ancient philosopher or text. 

I would be especially wary of the scholarship that pretends to have found hidden secrets accessible only to a special few. This sort of pretense is common among esoteric interpreters, interpreters who claim that the real message of the text is located "between the lines," and there are more than a few fans of such interpretations haunting the reddit subgroup r/askphilosophy and giving dubious advice. I say this as someone who thinks that some esoteric readings are the best readings. But this requires showing in every case, in light of all the available evidence and in comparison with all the competing interpretations. So while I am not here cautioning against all esotericism, a priori, I do suggest that the esoteric approach should not come first, but should be entertained only after all the evidence has been carefully considered. And I especially caution against giving attention to those esotericists who reject large amounts of evidence (under the bugaboo of "historicism") and who gleefully scorn certain objectors as unworthy of response. Every research program makes some assumptions, but respectable intellectual inquirers do not always run from, or scornfully reframe and reject, questions about those assumptions. This point generalizes, as I've seen similarly bad behavior from naturalist philosophers, from anti-naturalist philosophers, from feminist philosophers, from anti-feminist philosophers, etc. We all have our bad days. But as a student among Straussians at the University of Chicago and as a participant in Wash U's Workshop on Politics, Ethics, and Society (e.g., here), I have found it especially difficult to find esotericists on their good days, willing to engage intellectually with objections in light of all the evidence.   

If you want a more reliable guide to approaching the evidence for this or that ancient philosopher, I recommend The Routledge Companion to Ancient Philosophy, edited by James Warren and Frisbee Sheffield. It is unusually helpful on the methodological issues connected with the evidence. 

Also, if you are a philosophy student diving in to Classics, you can learn a lot from Eleanor Dickey's guide called Ancient Greek Scholarship, and if you are a Classics student diving in to philosophy, you'll want to acquaint yourself with the "classics" of twentieth-century philosophy, for which you could do worse than to start with the essays in Blackwell's Analytic Philosophy: An Anthology. 

• You went to the same university for college and for graduate school. Isn't that a mistake? 

Generally, yes, it is better to widen your intellectual horizons and expand your circle of contacts. I knew that, and was regularly reminded of it. But the universities where I would have preferred to go did not have medical school options that appealed to someone whose company I very much wanted to have. You cannot always get what you want.

But then again, if you try sometimes, you might find, you get what you need. On the one hand, in drifting toward ancient philosophy, I began taking classes with professors I had had no contact with as an undergraduate. It was as though I was in an entirely new department. And on the other, the department helped me by encouraging me to spend some time elsewhere, and I spent two terms in Cambridge and one year in Pittsburgh before I defended my dissertation. 

• What is SLAGRAP?

The St. Louis Area Group Reading Ancient Philosophy. I started it when I came to town in 1997. The membership in the group has changed with time, but Bob Lamberton has been a regular throughout and Henry Shapiro (RIP) was a regular up until the pandemic forced us to zoom. We've read lots of Plato (and some pseudo-Plato)—Alcibiades I, Charmides, Clitophon, Cratylus, Euthydemus, Euthyphro, Gorgias, Hippias Minor, Ion, Menexenus, Philebus, Protagoras, Republic X, Sophist, Statesman, Theages, Theaetetus, and Timaeus—some Aristotle (Politics I, Nicomachean Ethics VIII-IX, Eudemian Ethics VII), most of the Aristotelian Magna Moralia, some fragments of Empedocles, Epictetus' Encheiridion, Epicurus' Kuriai Doxai and Letter to Menoeceus, Stobaeus' excerpts from treatises on marriage by a Stoic Antipater (either Antipater of Tarsus or Antipater of Tyre), Marcus Aurelius II-VI, and Anonymus Londinensis. We also started and aborted Plutarch's Non posse suaviter vivi secundum Epicurum. Since Fall 2023, we have been reading Xenophon's Memorabilia I and IV, and we expect to finish in Spring 2025.