This is the second entry in the Cocoon's new series, Non-Traditional Paths into Philosophy, a series of guest posts by people who entered academic philosophy later in life or otherwise took a non-traditional path into the field. Today's post is by Paul Taborsky, a writing/composition Instructor at Centennial College who has published and been involved in academic philosophy as a relative 'outsider' without a graduate degree in the field. If you took a non-traditional path into philosophy and are interested in contributing to the series, feel free to email me at [email protected]!
By Paul Taborsky
I think the series on non-traditional paths in philosophy is a great idea. I suppose one could say that I have followed a non-traditional career path; I teach first-year composition at a Community College (in Canada), mostly to international students. But my real interest is philosophy. I don’t know if my story is of interest to anyone (or even appropriate, as I’m not strictly speaking a professional philosopher, although I have publications here), but I will outline it briefly.
I do have an undergraduate degree in philosophy, but I never went on to grad school. There are probably a number of reasons for that, some of which I am probably only beginning to come to terms with, but from an academic perspective the principle reason was that, as an undergraduate, I really had no idea what kind of philosophical path I wanted to follow. I was very interested in the history of philosophy, and almost all my course work was in that sub-discipline, but towards the end of my studies I began to be aware there was nothing that really stood out for me that could have been a potential area of specialization or inspiration for graduate school focus, much less a dissertation. It is hard to articulate exactly why I felt that way – it is probably a lot easier to explain why one might be interested in Kant, say, than to explain why no particular path was appealing, but that is how I felt. And how could one go to graduate school in such a state of mind? Or so it seemed to me at the time.
So, at the end of my last year, I had, for example, no ‘favourite’ philosopher (and I still don’t – I’ve always been puzzled by the way this is supposed to be a helpful way of thinking about philosophy), and no favorite ‘-ism’, no key issue or problem (well, not one that I knew what to do with, see below), i.e. no idea of a research programme at all, other than a general orientation towards the history of the discipline, as opposed to systematic philosophy, and what I guess could be called an ‘analytic’ mindset. I suppose I should have talked to someone or sought advice, or taken a more careerist approach, but somehow none of that happened. I was rather isolated as an undergraduate, and the only close friend I had at the time was in a different department (political science), so perhaps I wasn’t connected enough, but so it was. Also, I had started out as a physics major, not a philosophy major; I had originally planned to go into one or another branch of theoretical physics or possibly astrophysics. I think the general difference in outlook and thinking between science and the humanities might also have been a cause for some of my unease, as well. An anecdote might be helpful here: Once, at a party for foreign teachers in China (I was teaching English in China at the time; see below), I was approached by a middle-aged gentleman who was keeping to himself, apart from the others. ‘So’, he said to me, as I came into the room, ‘Are you a science guy or an arts guy?’. I was a bit taken aback by his question, but I explained that I was a bit of both, as I had initially majored in physics, but switched to philosophy. This fellow then said that he was from Melbourne, where he had taught Chemistry, and pointed to the largely younger crowd in the distance. ‘These people are all arts people’, he said. ‘I can’t understand them!’. So I could say that, despite being in philosophy, I remain largely, (but not entirely), a ‘science guy’ in my habits of thinking.
But back to the main story. Apart from my Political Science friend, I did know one or two of my classmates in philosophy, but they had interests quite different from mine. I wasn’t interested in Nietzsche or Heidegger, or phenomenology (although I have since come to appreciate phenomenology to some extent. It was actually my political science friend, of all people, who got me interested in reading Merleau-Ponty. That being said, none of my published work has anything to do with phenomenology, nor is it phenomenological in inspiration.)
Also, by that time, I had stumbled upon a few ideas in Foucault that seemed to seriously undermine a lot of presuppositions that many philosophers—especially analytic philosophers—usually take for granted, but given the general accord given to something like Davidson’s ‘The Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme’, it didn’t seem respectable to even doubt them, even the more so outside of ‘Continental’ philosophy circles. However, I had no deep interest in post-structuralism, or even most of the rest of Foucault’s work at all. I did actually take a course in post-structuralism, (and another one on Heidegger, taught by the same professor), but barely survived both, and left these classes with a deep distaste for continental philosophy in general. Thomas Kuhn? Well, I just wasn’t going to go that route, which seemed to lead to the sociology of knowledge, a field which, perhaps because of my background in physics, I found deeply unappealing.
So I didn’t feel at home anywhere in philosophy, at the time, and no idea how to deal with my peculiar combination of likes and dislikes. The small group of writers that I could say I now admire, mostly analytically-oriented Francophone historians of philosophy such as Jules Vuillemin, Martial Gueroult, Jean-Luc Marion and Jean-Paul Reding, I had not yet been exposed to as an undergraduate. Perhaps things might have been different had I had some knowledge of their work at the time, but there is not much point in this kind of counterfactual thinking.
In retrospect, there could have been some other areas of philosophy that might have captured my attention, had I had more exposure to or confidence in them, but in the end, I left without a plan, and drifted into various kinds of work, eventually ending up teaching in the English dept. at a community college, where I remain. But I suppose I remained an academic at heart, and eventually, after many years of neglect, started reading and thinking again. In particular, I started to try to articulate what had appealed to me about Foucault’s concept of an episteme, and his taxonomy of three historical epochs in what were (on his account) to become what we now call the social sciences. I had read a great deal since then, both in philosophy and in other areas, and found ways of dealing with these ideas by means of some very unlikely sources (to be specific: David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd, Johan Huizinga’s The Autumn of the Middle Ages, and the work of the French Philosopher-Anthropologist Lucian Levy-Bruhl) that I would never had paid much attention to had I stayed within the academic philosophy path (not to mention post-structuralism!).
To make a long story short, after many years I managed to publish a book (details here). Most of it was written when I was living in south-central China, having settled there, on my own, after a brief overseas teaching assignment with my college. I ended up marrying a local, and having a child there, as well. None of this would have happened, no doubt, had I actually gone to graduate school, or so it seems to me. Living in another culture, another language, another country, especially one so different as China (although not so different, really!) has changed my life in ways I can’t express. That said, the book, despite its title, entirely concerns some ideas in the history of philosophy and the history of the philosophy of science, and has nothing to do with cultures either East or West.
I’ve since managed to publish another book that fills in some gaps from the earlier book. I have a couple of published articles as well. All of these deal with ideas ultimately rooted in my first book. However, I’ve tried to make all of these later studies entirely ‘internal’, and so the framework that inspired them is not mentioned at all. I’ve also contributed to Philpapers as a ‘leaf’ area editor: (https://philpapers.org/browse/complexity/). (The position is now open as I stepped down in 2019, but all of the material there was written by myself.)
I don’t know if there any lessons in this at all. It’s not career ‘path’ I would recommend. It seems to be more a series of accidents that have not quite ended in disaster. Also, I had a weird set of interests that were hard to bring into coherence (physics, logic, the history of philosophy and the history of physics, Foucault’s concept of an ‘episteme’, coupled with a strong distaste for ‘Continental’ ways of philosophizing). That could have been a part of it.
Being an outsider allows me to escape a lot of the narrow specialization that appears to have consumed the profession. Still, I think Russell said somewhere that one could spend an entire lifetime studying just one of the major thinkers of the past, and there are certainly risks in attempting to make contributions that require more than non-specialist expertise. Thus, maybe narrow specialization is always going to be around. Someone like Jules Vuillemin (who passed away in 2001), who published interesting, new work on Aristotle, Descartes, the post-Kantians, the history of algebra, a historically oriented study of modal concepts, to mention only a few of his works, really seems to have belonged to another era, one that is hardly possible today.
As a non-professional, there is certainly a lot that I can’t do. I’m not even sure that I really belong at all, since I don’t have a Ph.D., and, at my age, there is little point in trying to do one (and I’m far too busy, anyway). I can only hope that there is something of value in the little work that I have managed to bring to fruition, and maybe to show that there may be other paths to contributing, if one is really dedicated.
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