I expect that not many readers of this blog will have heard of Professor Etienne Vermeersch, a philosophy professor who died recently, aged 84. But he was what one would call world-famous in Flanders, the part of Belgium where I grew up and studied as an undergraduate. I took his Introduction to Philosophy course (a first-year mandatory course for all undergraduates in arts and humanities) and a course on Christian thought.
Etienne Vermeersch was not famous outside of Flanders because he did not follow the publication model of writing philosophy in English, and as Anglophone philosophy is quite insular (see Eric Schwitzgebel's work on this) this work did not get much international uptake, as his writings were mostly in Dutch.
Nevertheless, I would be hard-pressed to think of many other philosophers that were as influential as Vermeersch. He took part in numerous television debates, wrote for newspapers and magazines, was involved in several governmental commissions on legislation about asylum seekers, weighed in on debates on legalising abortion and euthanasia, and much more. Politicians in Belgium listened to Vermeersch and were always interested to hear his opinion (just today Guy Verhofstadt wrote a tribute to him on FaceBook). He stated his opinion boldly, but always backed up by arguments.
Here I want to reflect on the art of lecturing, a much-maligned art as philosophy professor as tasked to make their work ever more entertaining and digestible for students (see e.g., Eric Steinhart's excellent recent post here on teaching statements where he says "Do you just stand there and lecture? Do you lecture with power point? Our students don’t respond very well to those styles.") - and how I experienced it as an undergraduate.
Etienne Vermeersch taught in a large lecture theatre that held 500 or so students, and had about 1000 students per year. His intro to philosophy was a historically organized course with few surprises in terms of content, except perhaps the near-absence of medieval philosophy (he thought, as he put it, nothing of philosophical importance happened then). There was no powerpoint. There were no notes. He just stood there, and lectured for almost 2 hours straight.
He would tell amusing anecdotes. About how he trained to be a Jesuit priest, but abandoned his training as he got doubts. He lectured on Anselm (one of the few Medievals we saw), and said "Now, to explain the ontological argument to you, I will actually need to use my brain. As a grad student, I always tried when I was getting drunk to see if I was still sober enough to try to reconstruct the ontological argument. If I could still do it, I knew I could get another drink, if I didn't anymore, I knew it was time to stop."
Before the lecture began, he encouraged us to put notes with questions we might have on his desk. Any question. No question was silly enough for him to respond to. He would then take each note, and read them out and answer in all seriousness (including the occasional heckling note). Often, the notes contained deeply personal wrought ethical dilemmas, such as "My friend is contemplating suicide, should I try to prevent him from doing it?" Vermeersch answered that it would be better to help the friend get the medical help he needed. But, he continued, if the friend still wants to do it after he has got the right support, then it was not your place as a friend to try to stop him. Ever the existentialist, Vermeersch was a keen proponent of euthanasia too.
As an 18-year-old I was utterly mesmerized by these lectures. Vermeersch was a vocal atheist, who had a short (to my knowledge, unpublished) paper entitled "Why the Christian God cannot exist", and he went over the argument with us point by point. It's not an exaggeration to say that several of my friends, who were keen and involved churchgoers, lost their faith hearing his lectures. It seemed like before taking his lectures, they had not given the matter any serious thought.
I've been thinking about the homogeneity of philosophy, which pushes us in specific directions. Publish in the most prestigious places, in English (of course), publish your books with OUP and your papers in Philosophical Review or similar. Graduate students, including in Belgium where he lectured, already become savvy about this early in their career. Also: don't lecture, no room for the sage on the stage. Make it interactive, digestible for students. While we can't easily shift the publication model, I worry that it is becoming an end in itself and does not necessarily forward the philosophical discussion.
Similarly, while there are many awful, dull lecturers, we would miss out on brilliant lecturers if lecturing became universally discouraged as a teaching style. Doing things, or having our students do things and be busy, is overrated. Sometimes it is nice to sit back and listen. In the case of Vermeersch, I was always ready to be perplexed and challenged. While feeling that perplexity, I think passively sitting and listening to him was probably the best intellectual response I could have at that time, probably better than being urged as an 18-year-old to produce my own views on the spot.
Lecturing can be done well. Publishing in obscure Dutch venues can be done well. While I disagree with Vermeersch on many, many issues, I think he had really come into his own, and by doing things well that he was good at--public speaking, lecturing, speaking to a broad audience, and debating, he did philosophy well.
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