[I]t is a truism that the best way to understand your native tongue is to learn another; and the best way to understand your culture is to become familiar with a radically different one. The contrast throws into prominence things so obvious as to have been invisible. So it is in philosophy. And when these assumptions become visible, they can be scrutinized in the cold hard light of day, to expose any shortcomings.--Graham Priest at DailyNous.
For some folk a PhD in philosophy is a capstone, but I have always viewed obtaining a PhD as akin to obtaining a union card; ideally it should launch your professional career, but at minimum it gives you (a modest) possibility to be employed in institutions of higher education around the world. More subtly: your apprenticeship ends, and you become a professional equal. There are two kinds of PhDs: one tackles familiar issues and questions; it exhibits mastery of the material and adds to the stock of knowledge about them. This kind of PhD fits pre-existing disciplinary categories and it is a reassuring presence on a CV. A second kind of PhD charts an independent course; a good working definition of such a second kind of PhD is that it creates categorization problems on the CV. Originality can be a feature of both kinds of PhDs, and, in practice, there are going to be lots of hybrids.*
My PhD was a hybrid; it fit 'early modern,' and 'history and philosophy of science,' but with its heavy focus on Adam Smith's epistemology and methodology as well as his political economy it also was a bit off-the-beaten-track. I chose the topic because I believed that I could convince my dissertation committee that we should understand Smith's (1795) "History of Astronomy" as an epochal moment in the history of philosophy and thereby change our understanding of 20th century philosophy of science. (That was a doomed effort.) I don't think the PhD helped me much on the job market (recall), but things turned out more than okay--so no complaints.
For all the anxiety and fear of graduate school, I loved being there, and I was astoundingly lucky that I was part of an amazingly talented cohort of people (Ryan Hanley, Fonna Forman, Lauren Brubaker, Chad Flanders, and Patrick Frierson) who were also working on Adam Smith in a variety of new ways. (It was not just luck because I got drawn into Adam Smith, in part, by overhearing the first three discuss Smith's philosophy in Classics Cafe.) In 1999, Sam Fleischacker (who taught an important seminar on Smith at UIC that I attended) and Charles Griswold published their books, and Darwall published his famous article. And these generated considerable interest in Smith's moral psychology--a lucky break. Unfortunately, from my perspective, the interest did not seem to carry over to Smith's epistemology despite my (undoubtedly tedious) repeated efforts to get folk interested (including quite a few graveyard sessions at APAs with more folk on stage than in the audience).
1999 was also the year that I joined a list-serv for the history of ideas. I am not sure of the exact course of events, but I believe I introduced myself and gave a précis of my research. Shortly thereafter, an economist from George Mason, David M. Levy, got in touch and we started corresponding. He sent me his papers on Adam Smith, and they influenced my dissertation. I was especially amazed by his brilliant paper on Berkeley's philosophy of mathematics. I then got what turned out to be a huge lucky break: within a year he invited me to George Mason University's economics department to give a talk at the very first Summer Institute for the Preservation for the History of Economics which he co-organized with the historian of economics, Sandra Peart (his frequent co-author and now Dean at Jepson). More amazingly: he offered money to cover my expenses (and then some). I have described one such visit here.
At the Summer Institute, I met leading historians of economics, world class economists (including two Nobel laureates), and an amazing group of scholars who could effortlessly switch among topics in philosophy, economics, and history. The conversations were erratic, dizzying, and exhilarating. But I learned an important intellectual lesson: I could discern that my disciplinary education had prevented me from seeing moves in the source material and philosophy more generally (recall Priest). When I was a kid, analytical philosophy did not teach systematic thought, but puzzle-solving; while that generates a certain form of depth it is bad at sensitizing the aspiring professional to what I'll call multi-dimensional (systemic) moves. (If you find the previous sentence obscure re-read my post on David Lewis, or read my incautious paper on Plato, Aristotle, and Babylonian economics.)
These conversations created new intellectual friendships, and inspired changes in my research orientation (e.g., analytical egalitarianism [including publications]; philosophy of economics; metaphysical/epistemic uncertainty, etc.); even before I taught Fanon, David Levy and Sandy Peart taught me the importance of the history of racism and eugenics within philosophy and economics (and I started to notice it subsequently, too; and recall this).
One other thing the Summer Institute provided me is an audience for my initial work on Adam Smith's epistemology and political economy (not to mention Hume's and Rousseau's political economy, and eventually my work on Chicago economics and economic methodology). By this I don't just mean that I learned invaluable lessons on how to present my material to audiences, who were coming from different backgrounds, and to draw them into my research questions. Without demeaning those lessons, they offered me the greatest academic gift: they provided me with an audience that made me feel my ideas were worthy of serious attention by strangers. Unsurprisingly, I keep returning whenever I can, and I am super pleased to be participating in the fifteenth annual Summer Institute this week in Virginia.
*This is not exhaustive, of course (e.g., Wittgenstein's, etc.)
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