The Hows and Whys

What really goes on in the department of philosophy

Signy Holmes Staff

Show someone a chemistry professor, and they might wonder what research she’s doing these days. Show someone a philosophy professor, and they might wonder whether he’s doing anything at all.

But what goes on in that department of mysteries may not be what you think. Carl Matheson, the department head of philosophy, said that what goes on in the department isn’t “space cadet-y” at all.

“The general idea of what philosophers do, where they get together and smoke some weed and talk about the nature of reality, that’s what we don’t do — most of the time anyhow,” he said.

“In our department we never try to deal too much with stuff that can’t be expressed or there’s no way of approaching it. That goes with our goal to be more or less as clear and free of bullshit as possible.”

More than the big questions

So if philosophy isn’t what the stereotypes might suggest, what is it? Matheson admitted that that’s a tough question to answer.

“Well in a sense, [philosophy covers] pretty well everything. Philosophers think about just about anything . . . if you just think about what philosophers can ask about, ‘what is knowledge?’, ‘what exists?’, ‘is there such a thing as free will?’, these are all subjects we deal with when we’re doing our first-year philosophy courses,” he said.

The faculty of the department has areas of expertise as diverse as one might expect from such a description. From Kira Tomsons, whose areas of specialization include feminism, lesbian ethics and environmental ethics, to Arthur Schafer, director for the Centre for Professional and Applied Ethics, who has done extensive work in the fields of bioethics and the philosophy of law, as well as social and political philosophy.

“I think when most people think about philosophy, they think about big questions,” said Schafer. Schafer has dealt with a lot of big questions in his work, questions that are relevant to society today.

“I do a fair bit of what I call forensic philosophy,” explained Schafer, who has been retained as an expert witness for legal cases involving panhandling bylaws in Winnipeg and prisoners’ right to vote at the federal level, among other things.

Schafer often takes the reports he writes as an expert witness and turns them into articles for publication. He described what he does as “writ[ing] at the interface between philosophy and society.”

In addition to the usual publications in scholarly journals like The Journal of Social Philosophy and the International Journal of Health Services, Schafer has written for more accessible publications, like the Winnipeg Free Press and the Globe and Mail, on several occasions, tackling subjects from sterilization of the mentally challenged to for-profit health care.

But what Schafer believes to be his “most interesting and challenging” work has to do with the topic of conflict of interest. The ethical issues involved in drug companies making “sizeable donations” to universities, as well as the gifts and financial assistance made available to medical and pharmaceutical students in many cases, can, in Schafer’s opinion, lead to complex problems.

“It relates to who funds the research and whether the researchers have academic freedom,” said Schafer, who wonders what “having our pharmacy and medical students becoming pals with the drug companies means in the long run” in terms of not always doing what’s best for the patient.

These are complex issues, and touchy for many, but thinking about them and offering his expertise to those of us who don’t even know where to begin is what Schafer does.

Another perspective to offer

Matheson points out that, in spite of Schafer’s successful stereotype-busting, the perception that philosophers are distant from current events is not entirely unfounded.

“Some philosophers do that a lot, where they try and see how much of the science can be plugged into the philosophical position. Other philosophers just stay in the realm of straightforward conceptual analysis, and they never get out of the armchair — ever,” he noted.

Matheson is confident, however, that this isn’t really a problem for faculty at the University of Manitoba. He said that while there are “two different styles of doing philosophy, the people in our department are more [interested in] see[ing] what people in other fields have to say, and how they can help us in philosophy.”

As an example he offered work he did with Tim Schroeder, an associate professor in the department, on “the so-called paradox of fiction: how is it that we care about what happens to fictional characters when we know they’re not real?”

For this apparently vague puzzle, Matheson said that what he and Schroeder did, using Tim’s knowledge of neuropsychology, is to “try and plug in some philosophical answers to the latest research in the psychology of representation.”

Maybe this philosophy thing isn’t so vague after all. But the views that many people hold about philosophers seem to be frustrating for Matheson.

“I guess students from different departments don’t get the method of philosophy at all . . . . [It]’s pretty unromantic sounding, but in the end, that’s basically what philosophy consists of most of the time: giving reasons for your positions or giving reasons against other people’s positions, period.”

In the end, said Matheson, philosophers “try to be as concrete and decisive as possible in the arguments we give for and against positions. Of course, we never think we’ve got the final word on it . . . [but] even when you’re doing really abstract stuff like metaphysics, the philosophy turns out being very applied.”

When you’re dealing with questions like “is Beethoven’s fifth symphony a concrete object located in time and space somewhere, is it just the score, is it some sort of mathematical or abstract object?”, as Matheson has along with associate professor Ben Caplan, it’s nice to know that your philosophical metaphysics are well-grounded.

But really — why?

If anyone is equipped to answer the question “why philosophy,” one would hope it would be a philosopher.

Schafer’s perspective is that “part of the answer is that people are learning to think critically . . . they’re learning to examine and inspect their own mental furniture [and ask] ‘how do I learn what’s true, how can I distinguish between truth and falsity, truth and bullshit?’”

He said that studying philosophy teaches you skills that can be useful in fields other than pure or applied philosophy — you learn skills that will be useful when you go into law or management or when you encounter a complex situation later on in life.

“People who have had philosophical training have been given tools,” he said.

Matheson agreed: “I think that for transmitting critical thinking skills, there’s nothing better than philosophy. I really think everyone should at least minor in philosophy,” he said.

With such a broad range of topics that can be considered under philosophy, the odds are that almost everyone could find some way of connecting to the subject, even if the traditionally “intellectual” topics don’t strike our fancy.

“I wrote a paper a few years ago on the use of irony in the Simpsons,” said Matheson. The paper focused on the show’s “use of irony, [and] whether it’s constant irony, which is then ironizing itself, will ever end — [it’s like an] irony treadmill.”

He also wrote about how the show requires an extensive knowledge of pop culture before you can understand the meaning behind many of the jokes. Who knew there was so much to say about the Simpsons? But rather than viewing this as a stretch — as looking for something to say — maybe we should be grateful someone is taking the time to think about the things most of us never do.

In Schafer’s view, while professors of philosophy at the U of M are pleased to see their students become better lawyers or stronger thinkers as a result of studying philosophy, what your average philosopher really loves is knowledge and the chance to think about issues that are important to them.

“We’re all human beings with a natural curiosity,” said Schafer — curiosity about our relationship to each other, to nature and to God. That is, if there is a God with whom to have a relationship, a question that opens a whole other can of worms.

It’s easy to be curious about these things, but to really tackle the tough questions takes more than curiosity.

Most of us just don’t have the time or the skills necessary to delve into questions like this — questions whose answers can really define us as people and as a society. That’s perhaps why Matheson wishes that North American philosophers occupied a role closer to the one he sees being filled by European philosophers, a role he described as “the idea of the philosopher as a public intellectual.”

For that to happen, though, he feels that some things would have to change.

“We’ve got to be able to say things short and sweet, we’ve got to make our point and not sound like doddering professors so people are waiting 20 minutes for the end of the sentence. We have to get right to the point and stay there . . . . Our department’s not too bad but generally, as much as philosophers, academics have a tough time getting to the point.”

But Matheson doesn’t place all the blame on the philosophers and the academics.

“Society has to be constructed so there’s a demand for intellectual capital, that’s the big difference between us and Europe,” he said.

The reason why is less clear. That’s the truth for any philosopher — eventually you get to the point where you can’t say for sure what the answers are. But Matheson has some ideas.

“People like experts here in North American culture, and they like to have all the technology work and everybody who’s teaching their children accredited, but there’s no pervasive intellectualism or love of intellectual stuff in North American culture. And in fact, it seems faintly anti-intellectual — if you’re just being an intellectual, then somehow you’re not doing anything useful, whereas in Europe it’s more respected: that’s what some people do, and furthermore, we can benefit from them.”

But whether or not we take advantage of what philosophers have to tell us, they’ll keep doing what they do, because, as Schafer said, “philosophy is about pursuing knowledge for its own sake.”