Interview with Professor Amia Srinivasan

Questions read by Ashley Singh, alicehank winham, Aamir Kaderbhai, and Jack Sagar, answers read by Katherine Franco, and audio recording compiled by Ashley Singh.

Questions written and edited by alicehank winham, Jack Sagar, Steven Diggin, and Ashley Singh

1. How ought we be doing philosophy? Is responsible theorising possible?

I don’t think there is one single ideal of ‘good’ philosophy, though there is bad philosophy, and all good philosophy had some things in common: imagination, rigour, originality. In general, I think we should be doing philosophy in a way that is at once disciplined and playful. In the case of moral, social and political philosophy in particular, I think we should be theorising in a way that is responsive to the way the world really is, in all its non-ideal dimensions, and that draws on the vast bodies of theory produced by feminists, critical theorists, sociologists, labour historians, and so on. That’s not a transhistorical statement about what social and political philosophy should be like, but a claim about what’s apt for our current moment. 

Should theorising be thought of as something that can be ‘responsible’ or ‘irresponsible’? I think it can, but within limits. On one hand we must be extremely protective of academic freedom; this is essential to securing the university as a semi-autonomous zone of free inquiry, which in turn is vital for a thriving democracy as well as a good in itself. So we shouldn’t police inquiry on the basis of what consequences it might have. But I think we as individual theorists can and should think about the ideological function of our theories, even or especially when we don’t expect them to play this function. What real-world consequences can we reasonably expect if we argue that (to take a couple of actual examples) torture is sometimes morally permissible, or parents have the right to euthanise their disabled infants, or that morality is a matter of maximising the efficacy of our charitable donations? To repeat, there should be no formal or de facto prohibitions on making such arguments in the university. But I think philosophers should spend more time thinking about what they are doing when they make arguments like this.

2. What does the term ‘public philosophy’ mean to you and how might we ‘use’ it? 

I confess I am a little wary of the term, because I think it attempts to sharply mark what is in fact a vague distinction between ‘real’ (academic) philosophy and the philosophy that you wheel out for ‘public’ consumption. Where do the essays that Bernard Williams or Derek Parfit wrote for the London Review of Books fall? The distinction, as it’s currently treated, leads to ‘public’ philosophy that, to my mind, has a tendency towards being simplistic and, at worst, condescending: a kind of rote application of certain philosophical ideas to certain ‘real world’ problems, as if that’s all that is needed to solve those problems. But there are better forms of public philosophy, as the examples of Williams and Parfit suggest. The best ‘public philosophy’ is sophisticated, original and addresses its target phenomena without diluting its complexity or pronouncing from on high. For what it’s worth, when I write for a non-academic publication like the LRB or New Yorker, I don’t think of myself as doing something called ‘public philosophy’: I’m just writing about things that interest me.

3. What do you think of the idea that a division of ‘epistemic labour’, by which we mean the specialisation of work and factioning of ‘branches’, is built in to analytic philosophy’s current set-up? Both how might the mere presence of this idea and –if you think actual– how would its instance affect what we can do in philosophy today?

I think there has been a clear trend towards increased specialisation in philosophy, as in many other disciplines. Some of that has to do with forces internal to the discipline itself. To work on problems with various subdisciplines you now need to simply know more than you used to, say forty years ago. Just think about how much you need to get on top of if you’re going to say something original about, say, the realism/anti-realism debate in metaethics, or vagueness, or egalitarianism. At the same time, I think there are outside forces that have driven the discipline towards specialisation, specifically economic forces. There are more philosophy doctorates being conferred than ever, and less funding and fewer jobs to go around. And of the jobs there are, there are fewer and fewer decent jobs; too many are precarious and poorly paid. So it makes more sense, from a strategic perspective, to focus intensively on a single problem than to range freely. I think this is, in general, bad for philosophers and for philosophy. It makes us less open, less aware of our own history, less creative. But the solution has to be in part economic: this is why the ‘adjunctification crisis’, a huge issue at Oxford (though we call them ‘temporary lecturers’ rather than ‘adjuncts’), needs to be taken seriously by everyone who loves philosophy.

4. Your worldmaking account of genealogy involves (something like) making a radical reconceptualisation of social reality in order to change that very reality into a less unjust form. Can (and should) aspects of academic philosophy be targeted for this kind of worldmaking reconceptualisation?

 It’s probably too grand to call it ‘worldmaking’, but I think that philosophers would do well to have a more capacious notion of both philosophy and brilliance.

5. "As a student of academic philosophy, I'm not well acquainted with any works in the Critical Genealogy tradition. But I'm setting up a reading group with friends to try to change that." Which texts would you recommend?

Here are some ideas to get you going: Nietzsche’s The Genealogy of Morals, Foucault’s Madness and Civilisation, Freud’s Civilisation and its Discontents, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble, Catharine MacKinnon’s ‘Feminism, Marxism, Method, and the State: Toward Feminist Jurisprudence’, Charles Mills’ The Racial Contract, Daniel Dennett’s The God Delusion, Uday Mehta’s Liberalism and Empire, Samuel Moyn’s Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World.

6. You say that the world is suffused with bad ideology, yet one gets the impression that you are strikingly optimistic about our ability to act from within this framework, to try to address and resolve deep injustices. Is this the case, and if so, how do you reconcile them? What is the secret to your optimism?

Even hegemonic ideologies aren’t really hegemonic. Where there is oppression there is always also resistance, and resistant ways of seeing the world. That said, I’m not sure I’m not an optimist. I just think we owe it to each other to resist the banality of nihilism.

7. With somewhat broadened access to higher education, many students might not find the language and stories of philosophy already at play adequate for learning how or being encouraged to engage in a meaningful way with the discipline. More diverse participation makes methodological reflection more evidently pertinent, yet students are often told this is off-limits at the undergraduate level in most papers, apart from some new exceptions like 'Feminism & Philosophy' and 'Indian Philosophy' where we must explicitly grapple with methodological differences to ‘mainstream’ Western philosophy concerns and procedures. How would you recommend students navigate learning about and questioning the philosophy they encounter here, while facing real structural, conceptual, and political barriers amid a wide variety of potentially transformative resources?

This is a very big question and I don’t think I have an adequate answer to it. It’s difficult to engage in methodological critique without having some sense of what one is critiquing -- e.g. ‘Western philosophy’. At the same time, once one begins to get a handle on the object of critique as an undergraduate, one is basically done with one’s degree. I think a deep problem here is that we don’t really teach the history of philosophy at Oxford. Even if one has a conventional introduction to the history of so-called “Western” philosophy -- beginning with Plato, and moving through Aristotle, Seneca, Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, Descartes, Hume, Berkeley, Locke, Spinoza, Kant to Hegel -- one gets a sense of just how methodologically diverse this (supposedly) single ‘tradition’ is. One can then start thinking about drawing connections between e.g. Plato’s Republic and Vyasa’s Mahabaratha, Or Aquinas and Ibn Tufayl, or Hegel and Frederick Douglass and Simone de Beauvoir. Instead we just require our undergraduates to read Mill, who -- though an important figure in the history of moral philosophy -- isn’t particularly interesting and, most importantly, is in a way all too familiar.

8. Can you explain, in a nutshell, why Externalist normative theories (broadly construed) do better than Internalist theories on the counts which really matter to us?

According to externalism, what matters for epistemic justification is whether an agent’s beliefs are produced by a mechanism that is adequately attuned to reality, whether or not that agent is aware of this fact, and whether or not it’s within an agent’s control that they are so attuned. Internalism denies that such attunement is either necessary or sufficient for justification. Thus internalists say that the brain-in-a-vat is justified, despite lacking such attunement; and BonJour’s unwitting clairvoyant is unjustified, despite exhibiting such attunement. For the internalist, justification tracks the notion of individual blamelessness -- what matters is doing the best one can, whatever one’s relationship to reality. For externalists, justification is a structural good, that runs orthogonally to blamelessness. It’s about how one is objectively situated vis-a-vis the truth, not whether one is ‘trying one’s best’. Basically, I think the structural, externalist notion is more valuable when thinking about real, non-ideal epistemology. In the actual world, people often know things without having any idea of how they know, e.g. the victim of racism who ‘just knows’ that the incident was racist, without having any access to her grounds for so believing.

9. At different points, you have characterised philosophy as something we cannot expect everyone to ‘get’, as something that gives us ‘new language for our pain’ or even as ‘play’. How do you apply these characterisations to historical and present philosophy versus its potential?

I think this characterisation is as true of the best historical philosophy – Plato, Nietzsche, de Beauvoir – as it is of the most interesting philosophy being produced today.

10. Recently student groups like ‘people for womxn in philosophy’ have raised concerns about the gender and BME performance gap, with a focus on exam workshops for more immediate academic survival as well as other projects for long-term systemic change. In your experience, what strategies are the most effective for supporting under-represented students in philosophy, whether or not they would like to pursue an academic career?

PWIP has been fantastic in providing resources that help students navigate the many challenges of studying philosophy at Oxford. Ultimately, I think the exam system has got to be seriously rethought. It systematically privileges a sort of superficial polish and ease over deep thinking and care, and is in that sense unphilosophical as well as discriminatory. I find that students from under-represented backgrounds sometimes need to be reminded that Oxford really is for them, and that their peers from over-represented backgrounds are no more intelligent or deserving than them. They also need to be reminded that they can and should ask for help if they need it, and that there are groups and spaces within the university that they might find particularly welcoming and intellectually exciting. I’ve found that just making it clear that I’m available to chat with any of my students helps, as does encouraging the individual intellectual interests of each of my students.

11. As Western philosophy departments take steps to broaden their contents, what must be done to ensure new introductions don’t become token changes or border-lined topics? What topics would you want to see included?

This is a really important question. I think we need multiple strategies, including whole new papers/classes (e.g. on feminist theory, critical race theory, Indian philosophy, Chinese philosophy, Africana philosophy) as well as a broader notion of what constitutes the philosophical ‘canon’ worth teaching. We need to begin by talking to the people who already do teach this stuff, instead of trying to rebuild wheels ourselves, badly.

12. What current trends in philosophy are you excited about?

I am cautiously enthusiastic about the growing interests in social and political philosophy, especially having to do with race and gender. At the same time, a lot of the new work being done in this vein doesn’t engage with the extremely rich bodies of theory that already exist about these topics, which I think makes it both intellectually impoverished and politically suspect. 

13. What are the most pressing issues you think we must be discussing both as philosophers and as philosophers at Oxford, and why?

The threats to the discipline and universities in general: the move away from public funding (especially in the UK) and the increasing reliance of donor money, and the exploited labour of precarious teachers.

14. Most underrated thinkers?  (+ who underrates them?)

I think a lot of philosophers don’t realise how intellectually powerful the canon of feminist theory is. I am struck by this every time I teach it. Reading Catharine MacKinnon or Shulamith Firestone or Angela Davis is not unlike reading Plato or Hume for the first time: thrilling, dizzying, demanding.

15. Most overrated thinkers? (+ who overrates them?)

I have my views about this, but in general I think we spend far too much time in philosophy talking down people, so I’ll demur.

16. What things do you wish you had known as an official student — undergraduate to graduate level?

So many things! That, despite appearances, your life is relatively un-busy now, and this is the time to read: widely, voraciously. That it’s good for your learning environment to be not exactly as you want it: you need something to hit up against, so that you can start thinking about the world you want to create. That that super-clever seeming person who never shuts up is not that clever, and their teachers are not that impressed by them.

17. You have written on the relationship between the ethical and the ineffable. With this in mind, where might analytic philosophy run out? What then?

When it does run out, it’s not possible to say. What then? We stop speaking, and start doing.

18. Any new projects on the horizon?

I have a book of feminist essays, called The Right to Sex, coming out in 2021. And then I’m going to turn back to a book project I’ve been working on for a while, on critical genealogy. I’m also working on pieces on feminist worldmaking and animals.

19. Thoughts on reclaiming ‘magic’?

I’m interested in the deep social forces that drive this reclamation -- presumably, a sense of disenchantment, spiritual desolation, alienation. What’s interesting to me is the way that, in the UK especially, this reclamation (of the occult, magic, astrology, spells, witchcraft, etc) has been popular among young people on the Left. The hope is that the recovery of magic doesn’t become a way of fleeing from material oppression, but a way of strengthening one’s capacity to fight it. Otherwise magic becomes what Protestantism was for Marx: a revolt in theory rather than practice.

20. What do you find most redeeming or valuable about Oxford, and philosophy at Oxford?

Oxford is not, by any means, a perfect institution: it remains an exclusionary place, for both people outside it and within it. There is much work to do. But, at its best, Oxford is -- to use the word -- a magical place, providing the sort of university experience that every young person who wants it should be able to have, with space and time to think, read, explore and play. There is a lot less time when you’re a faculty member, but there is still something very special, I find, about Oxford. In particular, it’s a very good place to hide away.

21. Career highlights?

Giving the ‘Feminism and Philosophy’ lectures in Michaelmas Term last year. So many students who were not sitting the paper came each week, a sign of the considerable appetite there is for feminist theory here at Oxford. It was, for me, moving and invigorating.