On Disagreeing with My Supervisor.

Yesterday, my one time supervisor (Garber) was the external examiner of a PhD in my department (I was not on the committee). After, at the festive reception, I had the distinctive pleasure of introducing him to my first and most advanced PhD student (Van Strien); her public defense is scheduled in September. (He will not be involved in that.) Just as my dissertation had been partly on the edge and largely beyond my supervisor's area of expertise, her project covers territory that goes beyond stuff I would (or could) publish on. The advantage of such projects is that there is no competition between student and supervisor; it also means one can be very receptive because one is really learning from one's student. The obvious danger is that one risks missing some problems obvious to experts. One also has to navigate a supervisor's potential lack of interest. My supervisor did not expect his students to keep track of his publications (or drafts); the one seminar I took with him turned out to be on material he was teaching himself and that to the best of my knowledge he has not really published on.

Even so, through a funny kind of osmosis (written comments, reading groups, shared public space at workshops/talks, etc.), social mores and intellectual commitments get transmitted. With hindsight, it's clear to me that in my first efforts at publishing after I came out of graduate school, I was a 'contextualist' historian of philosophy, which treated natural philosophy as an integral part of its history. From the reactions of others, I inferred that, in fact, I was (legitimately) perceived as my supervisor's student. Ironically enough, a few years out of graduate school, after I realized that I might disagree with some of my supervisor's most important methodological commitments and the complex ways of characterizing the relationships between physics and metaphysics in the early modern period, I started reading his work with great care and in detail. It was, in fact, exhilarating to present the product of my engagement to audiences that included him. In my image of myself at the time, this involved 'finding my own voice.'

I have been lucky enough that Garber was very good natured about our disagreements. Once he started an official comment on one of my papers with evident delight: "In this fine paper, Schliesser decisively refutes Schliesser 2002, Schliesser 2004, and Schliesser 20o5." His sharpest response to my explorations occurred another time; he was present in the audience when I was trying out a new line of criticism of him (this time not mentioning him by name, but just treating him as "a view popular at the University of Chicago"). During the Q&A, he made a point of stating, "You should know that Garber's views have evolved since the mid 1990s."

Over lunch today, he was telling me about his new project--an extended criticism of Thomas Kuhn's idea that the scientific revolution was about one paradigm replacing another paradigm. He was running through his criticisms and the ways he would flesh them out. And I had the uncanny experience of him articulating the project that I have been working my way toward for the last half decade: at bottom I have agreed with him all along.