What Is It Like to Be a Philosopher?

In this interview, Anne Margaret Baxley talks about growing up Methodist in Macon, Georgia, being a devil’s advocate, Camp Seafarer, stealing her mother’s car, developing an early interest in the Stoics, Virginia Woolf, Flannery O’Connor, boarding school, deciding to study philosophy at Wellesley, working with Owen Flanagan, Adrian Piper, and Ruth Anna Putnam, developing an intense interest in Kant, Anita Hill, Rodney King, going to UCSD for grad school, surfers, eliminative materialism, the Churchlands, the Kitchers, her buddy Elizabeth Buffalo, the thing-in-itself, tequila and Tijuana, autocracy and virtue, working with Henry Allison and David Brink on her dissertation, teaching responsibilities and the pressure to publish in grad school, hotel room interviews and weird campus visits, landing a job at Virginia Tech, a sociopathic colleague, becoming friends with Marjorie Grene, Appalachian music, moving on to Washington University St. Louis, her approach to graduate mentorship, studying the relationship between morality, virtue and happiness, free-will, Bernard Williams, exciting and disconcerting trends in philosophy, The Stranger, The Big Lebowski, Baby Beluga, Ozark, Westworld, election night 2016, election 2020, and her last meal…

[6/19/2020]

Where did you grow up?

I grew up in Macon, Georgia, a small city in middle Georgia, about 85 miles south of Atlanta. I left for good when I was sixteen after lobbying my parents to let me go to boarding school. Wherever I go, the most common thing people tell me about Macon is that they drove past it once on I-75 South on their way to Florida.

What was your family like?

My father was an Ear, Nose and Throat surgeon, and my mother was a stay-at-home mom and homemaker – a term that’s out-of-fashion, but perfectly captures all that she did in organizing and overseeing every aspect of domestic life. I have a brother who’s three years younger.

Our family life essentially revolved around a close-knit suburban neighborhood where kids roamed freely and spent countless hours playing outdoors, unsupervised by adults, our country club – aptly named “Idle Hour Country Club”- church, and the hospital where my Dad practiced.

If I had read less Southern Gothic Literature, I’d say that we were an ordinary, normal, conventional Southern family.

Religious household?

Yes, but not devoutly or demonstratively so. I grew up in the Methodist Church. Church was a routine part of the social fabric of family life, as it was for most of my friends. On Sundays, we went to Sunday School followed by church service, and we celebrated Christmas, Palm Sunday, and Easter. We always said a prayer before eating dinner at home, but never in public – that would have been unthinkable!

For a couple of years in my early teens, I was active in the United Methodist Youth Foundation, which I relished because it exposed me to kids who didn’t go to my same private school and gave me the opportunity to debate social, political, and moral issues, something we didn’t do much at home. I ended up being labeled “the devil’s advocate” by the adults moderating the group, which they probably meant literarily because I was an outlier liberal in the group (feminist, pro-choice, a democrat - God forbid!). During that time, the religious right movement in American politics had gained momentum, and I was aware of its cultural influence, because the world I inhabited was socially and politically quite conservative.

As a little kid, what were you interested in?

I took ballet and piano lessons, but was more interested in sports, especially tennis and swimming. I loved books and reading and found escaping into a writer’s imagination to be a welcome antidote to loneliness. To this day, my idea of a perfect day is one spent in solitude, surrounded by whatever stack of books I happen to be reading at the time. I adored animals—we always had a family dog and, for a brief happy period of time, rabbits and a bird. The thing I loved most when I was young was summer camp, which for me was a sort of haven – a place of great adventure, freedom, and friendship, where there were no fixed ideas or circumscribed expectations about gender roles. I started going to sleep-away camp at age 6, which seems crazy to me now that I have a young child, but my absolute favorite place on earth for many years was Camp Seafarer, a sailing camp on the Neuse River in Arapahoe, North Carolina, where I’d spend a month each summer in complete bliss. The camp had a Land and Sea Program, with activities organized by various ranks that were outlined in official Green and Blue books that campers would carry around like little Passports. The Blue book for Sea, for example, included a set of ranks in sailing along with the requisite skills required for each one, where the first few ranks involved learning basic seamanship skills (knot tying, safety, basic boating skills) and the more advanced ones involved mastery in cruising or racing, demonstrating on Sunfish and Lasers, then 420s and Flying Scots, and finally Lightnings and Keelboats. For a type-A overachiever who loved a challenge and a gold star recognition for meeting it, it was a dream come true. I fell in love with sailing, but, more than that, camp was a formative experience for me because of the strong female role models and what I later recognized as its culture of female empowerment.

How were you similar to and dissimilar from, the rest of your family?

When you’re young and figuring out who you are and finding your way in the world, the dissimilarities are the things you notice most. I felt like I was swimming against the tide in many ways, more circumspect and critical of traditional conservative Southern values, more anxious and worried about the deplorable race relations and oppressive gender norms that were so much a part of my world. I was aware that the world was a big place, and I was eager to see how other people lived and felt a lot of unease, perhaps even antipathy, toward the South as I knew it.

But now I see a lot of similarities with my family, with whom I’m very close.

I’d like to think that, like my father, I’m even-tempered, amiable, and optimistic – we tend to see the glass as half-full and operate under the assumption that things work out for the best. We both love books and are intellectually curious. One of the greatest gifts I inherited from my dad is the ability to take pleasure in pursuing an idea or subject for its own sake, without any obvious or practical purpose. Sometimes that skill might drive the people around you nuts – for example, when you eagerly explain for the tenth time that a hummingbird’s wings beat between 50 and 200 flaps per second depending on the direction of flight, the purpose of flight, and the surrounding air conditions—but it is a tremendous consolation in life.

My mother is unusually resourceful, capable, enterprising, and resilient. She’s never met a problem she can’t solve or a person unworthy of her concern. I’m much less compassionate and helpful than she is, but I share with her a broad interest in people and basic sympathy toward their concerns, even when their lives are very different from my own. My mom and I are industrious and hyper organized, and we both believe in the inherent value in having beautiful surroundings, a well-managed home, and good manners.

My brother is one of the funniest people I know and was always the life of the party growing up. I’m not nearly as funny as he is, but we have a similar sense of humor and appreciate many of the same qualities in people. He’s imminently stable, even-keeled, non-neurotic, conscientious, and reliable. He’s averse to complaining and self-indulgence, as am I. Neither one of us takes ourselves too seriously, we don’t like personal drama, and we both work hard but enjoy and take pleasure in the good things in life. He’s also a wonderful parent – patient, warm, accepting, engaged without being overbearing– qualities to which I at least aspire!

As a teenager, did you get into any trouble?

I never got into any real trouble at school. I loved school, and I was a serious student. I looked up to my teachers almost without exception, and I cared too much about what they thought to get into trouble. Outside of school, it was the usual suburban shenanigans—underage drinking, smoking cigarettes, parties in cul-de-sacs until the police showed up, sourcing the best fake IDs. Once a friend and I stole my mother’s car when my mother was in the hospital. I was fourteen at the time and had no idea how to drive. By the time my father got home from work, one of the stay-at-home moms in our neighborhood had already called him. His reaction was brilliant – he took me aside and calmly said, “I have some advice for you: next time you take the car out, don’t park it back in the middle of the two-car garage.” That felt more shaming than being punished! But I like to think that I never got in trouble because I was smart enough not to get caught.

Favorite subjects in high school? Books? Music? Interested in sports? Art? Science? Politics? Psychology? Philosophy?

I loved History, English Literature, Civics, French, and Creative Writing. I thought short fiction writing was the highest form of art, and what I might pursue as a career if it were possible to make a living writing short stories. Then, in my 6th Form (or senior) year at boarding school, a wonderful, unexpected thing happened when I had to take a required religion course taught by one of the school’s Episcopalian Priests. I had no interest in studying religion, especially from a traditional member of the clergy, but as it turned out, we spent the entire semester reading nothing but the Roman Stoics - Seneca, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius. That was a turning point for me in terms of academic interests, and I was enthralled with the novel world of inquiry the Stoics represented. The very nature of the moral and ethical questions with which those thinkers were engaged as well as their sustained, systematic investigation of them was unlike anything else I’d studied within the humanities. The investigation into the nature of happiness and how to achieve it, the view of goodness and its relation to value, the account of human psychology and theory of emotions, and the moving image of the Sage as genuinely happy and free, lacking nothing, enjoying an enviable independence from the reversals of fortune—those ideas and themes gripped me as timeless, profound, and clearly worthy of deep reflection and study. I knew nothing about academic philosophy, and I’m sure I understood very little of what I read, but I knew I wanted to study philosophy in college.

I was also keenly interested in feminism and feminist theory and carried around copies of feminist classics of the day, like Gloria Steinem’s Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions and Marilyn French’s The Women’s Room, which many of my classmates found curious. Outside of class, I read widely across genres – novels, short stories, poetry, memoirs – but most of what captured my attention during that time of my own self-discovery were works by women writers, especially Virginia Woolf, Alice Walker, Margaret Atwood, Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde, Elizabeth Bishop, Adrienne Rich, Grace Paley, Toni Cade Bambara, and the great Southern women writers, including Flannery O’Connor, Carson McCullers, Eudora Welty, and Ellen Gilchrist.

Apart from academics, I played a lot of sports and was on the tennis, basketball, and volleyball teams, and for a while I was into photography.

Was high school a pleasant experience, overall? Did you start thinking about what you wanted to do in college, if college was even on the table?

It was—very much so. I was fortunate to spend my last two years of high school at St. Andrew’s School, a small co-ed boarding school in Middletown, Delaware. If you’ve ever seen the film Dead Poet’s Society, which was filmed there right after I graduated (in 1988), you’ll know how visually stunning the school is. I had a wonderful experience there, and the school had a profound impact on my development (academically, socially, and personally). My classes were rigorous and challenging, on the level of college seminars, and all taught by exceptionally talented teachers. Having been in academia for my entire adult life, it’s astonishing to me when I reflect on the level of excellence of the faculty. The teachers I had were genuinely skilled artisans of education – brilliant, inspiring, passionate, charismatic. From an academic perspective, I learned a tremendous amount about a range of subjects, and especially how to think and write independently and critically. Socially, it was a welcome change because the student body was much more diverse than what I was used to – racially, socio-economically, politically, culturally, geographically, but, more than that, diverse in terms of its ethos of openness to a variety and range of ideas, perspectives, interests, points of view, and values. Personally, it was liberating to be part of a community that valued diversity of thought and opinion and vigorous debate about ideas over comfort and conformity.

Where did you apply? What was the plan?

My parents were adamant that I was going to go to college somewhere in the South, and I was thus dead set on going to college in New England, which I had romanticized as the intellectual center of the country. Lines were drawn, as in, “You will not apply to any colleges north of the Mason Dixon Line.” In vain, my mother took me on a college tour of what must have been every reputable school in the Southeast—we must have visited twenty schools. In one of our finer moments, my mother and I had a stand-off on a bench outside of the Admission’s office at Sewanee (The University of the South), where I patiently explained that I would not be applying to the school she thought was perfect for me on the grounds that they did not have a Women’s Studies department. (I needed a reason, and that wasn’t decisive, but it was the best that I could think of on the spot!). I hadn’t considered going to a women’s college, but the schools I ended up liking the most out of the places I visited in New England were Smith and Mt. Holyoke. My guidance counselor insisted that if I liked Smith and Holyoke, I absolutely must consider Wellesley, which he thought would be a good fit for me. I took him at his word and visited Wellesley the following weekend and that was it for me – I knew I had found my place. Wellesley had an early action program at the time, so I applied early and that’s where I went.

I knew I wanted to study Philosophy and planned to also take courses in creative writing and Women’s Studies. I didn’t veer from that plan. At Wellesley, I double majored in Philosophy and what was then called Women’s Studies and wrote a collection of short stories for my senior honors thesis under the supervision of Ruth Anna Putnam, from the Philosophy department, and a wonderful writer, Stephen McCauley, who was teaching creative writing in the English department at the time.

Inspirational teachers?

When I was at Wellesley, the Philosophy department had an abundance of inspiring teachers, including Katheryn Doran, Owen Flanagan, Alison MacIntrye, Ken Winkler, Ifeanyi Menkiti, Ingrid Stadler, Maud Chaplin, Ruth Anna Putnam, and Adrian Piper.

Owen Flanagan was a magnetic personality whose classes were so popular that he had to schedule them for 8am to discourage students from enrolling. Katheryn Doran was a phenomenal, naturally gifted teacher. Largely because of her, I decided to major in philosophy my first semester of college after taking her Intro to Moral Philosophy class, which had a cult following on campus, and which remains one of the most rewarding classes I’ve ever taken. Ken Winkler was an extraordinary teacher and scholar who had an infinite reserve of patience, generosity, and kindness in dealing with Wellesley undergrads, who tended to be spirited and self-assured, and who knew a lot less than we thought we did.

What was Adrian Piper like?

One of the highlights of my academic career was studying with Adrian Piper, who joined the faculty at Wellesley my junior year. I remember there was a great sense of excitement on campus about the arrival of this world-renowned artist and highly regarded academic who was at the height of her career in two separate fields. I had become interested in Kant’s moral theory in Katheryn’s class on moral philosophy with what I can only describe as the passion of someone in the grips of religious conversion – I thought Kant was right! But it wasn’t until Adrian’s classes that I started to study Kant seriously. Her lectures on metaethics and Kant were brilliant, awe-inspiring, arresting in their complexity, detail, and depth. My friends and I would spend hours after her classes trying to reconstruct what had happened and figure out what we had actually understood, usually over wine and cigarettes. I learned a lot from being exposed to her kind of singular genius, and the experience opened my eyes to the world in many ways. Adrian was an important mentor for whom I have tremendous esteem and abiding affection.

And what was Ruth Anna Putnam like?

I remember Ruth Anna vividly for her incisive mind, quick wit, and wisdom. She treated students with respect, and that meant she didn’t sugarcoat criticism, pander to us, or tolerate bullshit of any kind. She was good-natured and encouraging, but she was also comfortable letting you know when you had said something stupid, ignorant, or misguided. When I sought her advice about graduate school and told her I wanted to get a Ph.D. in philosophy as well as an M.A. in creative writing, she was adamant that I should first pursue the Ph.D., but she didn’t hesitate to add that she thought I was a better writer than a philosopher.

Least favorite philosophy classes?

My least favorite classes in philosophy by a wide margin were Philosophy of Language and Logic. My least favorite class in college - bar none - was Econ 101.

How did college hone your skills as a philosopher?

More than anything else, college helped me develop as a philosopher because it taught me about the value of vigorous critical debate, which was not merely encouraged but virtually required in nearly all of the classes I took. It was unimaginable to show up to class unprepared to discuss the assigned reading and to offer reasons for views you cared to defend, at least until they needed to be abandoned in the face of compelling objections from your peers. Even the average student at Wellesley was outspoken, self-possessed, and full of conviction, and of course it was a women’s college, so class discussion was dominated by women who were not afraid to speak up and argue for their views. Learning how to engage in that kind of lively philosophical exchange in pursuit of some deeper level of self-understanding or understanding about a text was invaluable.

What did you do in your spare time?

Wellesley was unusual in the way that students were heavily involved in all aspects of college life and the shared governance of the institution alongside faculty and the administration. College government was a big draw for a lot of people, including me. All four years, I was on the General Judiciary in charge of implementing the college’s long-standing honor code. In my one foray into elected office, I ran for and won the position of Chief Justice of College Government, an experience that helped me see I had no taste for arbitration or adjudicating delicate matters of importance involving other human beings. I was photography editor of The Wellesley News along with one of my best friends. I was a member and manager of Café Hoop, a wildly popular campus café and co-op that was housed in a dark, asbestos-ridden basement of the former student center and was the scene of many tearful break-ups and co-ed drama. I was part of an active LGB affinity group. I have no recollection of anything meaningful we accomplished or even what our political demands were, but by god we threw some killer women’s parties.

Love?

You might think with all of those extra-curriculars there was no time for love, but Wellesley was rich terrain and a very open, inclusive environment for exploring love of all kinds, in all of its dimensions, with all of its highs and lows. For me, that was an essential part of my college experience and journey into adulthood, and I think everyone should be so lucky to have the opportunity to devote a healthy part of their college experience to love and relationships of all varieties.

Drugs?

I don’t remember drugs being a big part of my social scene, but I had a lot of friends on the swim, soccer, and rugby teams, so there was always a keg of beer in the shower of our dorm floor and a resident dorm advisor haranguing us to dispose of it.

How did your worldview evolve?

I’m not sure I was in possession of anything as lofty as a worldview, but during my college years, I got greater clarity about my own values—what I cared about, what I thought was important, and what held little attraction or interest for me. That had an impact in that it helped me understand my own feelings of alienation and ambivalence about the Southern culture in which I grew up, it gave me a firm sense of the kind of relationships I wanted to have, and it motivated me to pursue a career about which I felt passionate instead of something more mainstream or conventional.

All of that sounds solipsistic, but if I had anything like an evolving view about the larger world around me, it had something to do with the core message of Kant’s transcendental idealism—the idea that we only know the world as it appears to us, not as it is in itself. Of course, by that Kant meant that there are universal and necessary conditions of human knowledge—namely, space and time as forms of human sensibility and the categories of the understanding as forms of thought—that we bring to the world and that thereby determine what the world is like for us. For Kant, transcendental idealism is fundamentally a doctrine about the epistemic conditions of human knowledge in general, but at the time, I think I interpreted this core of Kantian idealism more broadly, in the vein of the famous Anais Nin quote, “We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.” That kind of perspective on objectivity – the idea that we see things through the lens of our own history, upbringing, privilege, suffering, hidden hopes and fears, unconscious desires and motives—had a big impact in shaping my outlook on world, and it’s certainly helped me have more empathy in life, toward myself and others.

Hey, me too. So, what were the short stories on?

The short stories were actually thinly-veiled autobiographical narratives told from the perspective of a plucky and independent young Southern girl coming to terms with the hypocrisy, racism, and sexism that punctuated her confined, provincial world as well as her own sexual orientation - which is why I had to burn them!

So, how did the girl come to terms with her sexual orientation? Her family?

The girl accepted the fact that the freedom to live openly and unapologetically always outweighs the cost of pretending in order to pass, and also by finding her own tribe. Her parents, much to their credit, went to therapy to deal with their own feelings of fear and anxiety about the unknown.

When did you decide to commit to grad school?

I had a sense early on in college that I would go on to graduate school, mainly because I thought it sounded ludicrous to get a job right out of college when you could just stay in school for another decade while maintaining at least the appearance of respectability. I wanted to write fiction, and I wanted to study more philosophy. Because I was naïve and knew nothing about academia, I thought that a career in philosophy seemed like a solid choice and reasonably safe bet. So, with very little forethought or deliberation, in my senior year I decided to apply to Ph.D. programs in Philosophy.

What was your writing sample on? Where did you want to go and why?

Of all things, my writing sample was a critical paper on Richard Brandt’s account of the rational authority of moral norms, which I had written in a metaethics class with Adrian Piper. If it stood out at all it wasn’t because it said anything interesting or original but must have been the only paper on Brandt in that year’s applicant pool.

I was determined to study Kant, especially Kant’s moral theory, and at the time I was captivated by Kant’s views on freedom and his doctrine of transcendental idealism. Given my interests, Adrian Piper suggested that I should go to UCSD to study with Henry Allison. If Adrian had suggested that I go jump into a fire, I would have done so happily, but her advice served me well. Adrian knew Henry, and she admired his work; she had just spent a couple of years in the department at UCSD immediately before coming to Wellesley. I’m sure she thought that if I trained with Henry, I’d get a rigorous education in the foundations of Kant’s ethics that was informed by Kant’s broader theoretical philosophy, and she was certainly right about that.

Any major world events--political, technological, cultural changes or trends, etc.--that had a significant impact on your life and worldview during college?

The two things that come to mind as having had the biggest impact were the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill hearings and the L.A. riots that erupted after police officers were acquitted in the Rodney King trial, both of which took place my senior year and really rocked the campus.

Everyone I knew was transfixed by the Senate hearings investigating Hill’s allegations of sexual harassment by Thomas, and we were genuinely outraged at the way she was treated by the Senate Judiciary Committee and in the press. To see that level of unmasked sexism and misogyny amongst even people on the left - who took themselves to be liberal or progressive - was frankly shocking to us, living in a female ivory tower bubble as we were.

Later that year, right before graduation, the L.A. riots disrupted campus in a major way - there were sit-ins, marches, rallies, and painful conversations among different groups on campus about race and racial injustice. We were idealistic and had been somewhat sheltered from the day-to-day experience of gender and racial discrimination during those college years, and those two events awakened us to the real world and the extent of the social-political injustice afflicting the country.

Surprises in grad school?

Before starting the program at UCSD, I had never even visited Southern California, which was very different culturally from anything I’d experienced in the South or in New England. The UCSD campus was populated with real-life surfers straight out of Fast Times at Ridgemont High. It was common for undergrad students to come to class barefoot, in Umbro soccer shorts or board shorts and halter tops. Grown men in grad seminars wore tank tops and athletic shorts and flip flops. No one seemed to wear pants! People introduced themselves by first names only, never a surname. Departmental parties were often at a faculty house where there was a big hot tub, and invitations would include a reminder, “Bring your bathing suit!” I remember sitting there wondering, is it weird that I’m in a bathing suit in November, drinking Chardonnay in a hot tub with the renowned philosopher of mind whose pioneering work was formative in ushering in the newly recognized field of neurophilosophy?

On the academic side of things, I was surprised by how little I knew, and how challenging it was to discover anything original to say about any given topic I studied. By the end of grad school, I was surprised by how narrow the discipline was becoming, and how difficult it was for philosophers to talk to one another across increasingly fragmented, specialized sub-fields.

Right. Philosophically, what was trending there at the time? In general?

Eliminative materialism was trending in a major way – so called “folk concepts” such as consciousness, thought, and free will ought to be revised in physically reductionist ways as neuroscientists discover more about the nature and function of the brain. Pat and Paul Churchland were very influential in the department and had a loyal following of students working in philosophy of mind and neuroscience who fervently adhered to the maxim, “To understand the mind, you must understand the brain!” Pat organized a running workshop whose de facto title was “No Armchair Philosophy,” and the flyer advertising it was literally an oversized, cushy armchair with a circle and slash through it.

Awesome. Overall, what were the other strengths of your grad program?

The department’s primary strengths at the time were in philosophy of science and philosophy of cognitive science, philosophy of mind and neuroscience, and Kant and German Idealism.

Inspirational teachers or classes?

When I arrived, Robert Pippin had just left for U. of Chicago, but his presence in the department was still very much alive. With Henry Allison and Pat Kitcher as major forces in Kant scholarship, new hires like Michael Hardimon, Fred Neuhouser, and Wayne Martin working on Hegel and Fichte, and the senior Heidegger scholar Frederick Olafson still active in research and teaching, it was an extraordinary place to study Kant and German Philosophy.

Henry’s seminars were legendary for their intensity of focus, difficulty, and depth. He would teach an entire seminar on just the Dialectic or the B-Deduction of the Critique of Pure Reason.

Pat taught a lively seminar based on her book, Kant’s Transcendental Psychology, which had recently been published and was garnering critical attention. There was a lot of excitement and constructive dialogue within the department about Kitcher’s views concerning the unity of the thinking self and the psychological prerequisites of thought, and how she and Allison differed in their interpretations of Kant’s theory of cognition and the doctrine of transcendental idealism.

Wayne Martin taught a memorable class on the early reception of Kant’s first Critique in which we read a range of lesser known 18th Century critics of Kant, and in which I discovered an abiding appreciation of Schiller’s philosophical essays.

David Brink taught seminars on a wide range of topics in the history of ethics and contemporary value theory, including Greek Ethics, Metaethics, Practical Reason, T.H. Green, Mill’s Moral and Political Philosophy, that were some of the most stimulating classes I’ve ever taken.

Jerry Doppelt and Dick Arneson taught a renowned course on Rawls and his critiques that nearly every student in the department seemed to take, no matter their core area of focus.

There were certainly other inspiring teachers in the department whose classes were popular – the Churchlands and Philip Kitcher – but those were the ones that had the biggest influence on me.

Who did you talk with most about philosophy? Who did you hang with?

One of my best friends from college, Elizabeth Buffalo, started the Philosophy program with me at UCSD. She was a Pat Churchland student who ended up getting her Ph.D. in Neuroscience, and who now has her own lab at University of Washington studying the neural mechanisms that support learning and memory in monkeys. We lived together, did most of our coursework together, and talked endlessly about everything we were studying in a wide range of seminars – Kant’s theoretical philosophy, Kant’s moral philosophy, German Idealism, Rawls and his Critiques, Philosophy of Logic, Philosophy of Language, Philosophy of Mind, Plato, Greek Ethics. I remember many animated late-night conversations after Henry Allison’s first Critique seminars in which we scrutinized what it meant to conceive of things as they are in themselves, not as they appear. We had a wonderful cohort of Philosophy grad students who socialized together regularly and spent lots of time just sitting around talking philosophy, in our favorite coffee houses around the city or at the beach. In so many grad programs, there’s fierce competition among the grad students, but UCSD was much more relaxed and congenial. It was a supportive environment in which we aspired to do well, but not at the expense of one another. I don’t recall any significant infighting or back-stabbing among the grad students, even though the department was somewhat divided into two basic camps – empirically-oriented philosophy of mind and science versus history of philosophy and value theory.

The thing in itself is endlessly fascinating. What did you do for fun?

There was always a beach barbecue with a bonfire happening, or an impromptu trip across the border to eat cheap Mexican food and drink tequila in Tijuana. We spent an inordinate amount of time at the beach and, on occasion, at a resort swimming pool that we would sneak into for the day – we would load a backpack with whatever books we were reading and crash for the day poolside. During my first semester at Virginia Tech, when I was teaching a grad course on Kant and Hegel, I opened my copy of the Phenomenology of Spirit and sand came pouring out of the binder, spilling all over the seminar table. In my mind, that perfectly encapsulates my experience in grad school. We studied and worked hard, but we had an immense amount of fun exploring our amazing backyard playground of beautiful San Diego County.

What was your dissertation on?

My dissertation was on Kant’s theory of virtue, with a focus on the moral psychology central to the account of virtue Kant develops in his later and less well-known ethical texts. In my research, I had discovered that Kant appeals to the concept of “autocracy” to characterize the moral self-command or strength of will required for virtue. My dissertation offered an analysis and assessment of Kant’s account of virtue in terms of the autocracy or pure practical reason, and the fuller moral psychology associated with autocracy as rational or moral self-governance.

Dissertation advisor? What was that process like?

I had two advisors, Henry Allison and David Brink, who co-chaired my dissertation.

I had gone to UCSD to work with Henry, and I took every seminar he taught during my time in the program, most of which were on Kant’s theoretical philosophy. David arrived the year after I started, and I ended up taking lots of seminars with him (in metaethics, normative ethics, and the history of ethics), and he was a terrific teacher and mentor. The two couldn’t have been more different, not just in terms of the nature and approach of their own work, but in terms of their personalities and advising. When I arrived, the lore about Henry Allison was that he made grown men cry and had ushered several students out of the program by helping them realize they weren’t cut out for a career in philosophy. Henry is a brilliant scholar whose expertise and understanding of all aspects of Kant’s theoretical and practical philosophy -- his aims, methods, arguments, broader philosophical importance -- is staggering, but he was an intense and formidable person who had exacting standards that were hard to live up to. With him, you were painfully, sometimes embarrassingly, aware when you hadn’t measured up, and he never gave praise when it wasn’t warranted. After my final seminar presentation in the last class he taught at UCSD, I found him walking out of the grad student mail room, where he had left me a hand-written note that said, “I just wanted to let you know I thought your presentation this afternoon went well. It was as if you could have gone on and on, all night, which is how it should be.” That was one of maybe two compliments he ever gave me, and I still have the note in my desk drawer today! Henry was always available to talk and gave helpful written feedback within 48 hours of receiving drafts of chapters, but he was not expansive in his communications, so what he said was always succinct, efficient, and straight to the point.

David was the opposite of Henry in many ways. He’s obviously a distinguished philosopher who’s made substantial contributions to an impressive range of core areas in ethics, political philosophy, and jurisprudence, but more than that, David was just an incredibly warm, kind, encouraging mentor and teacher who charitably overlooked others’ flaws and was able to see the best in his colleagues and students. He was unfailingly patient and supportive and was great at motivating me to think more systematically about the philosophical issues underlying Kant’s views.

Sometimes I got conflicting advice about the direction of my project when I was writing the dissertation, but I think having both of them as advisors was tremendously beneficial for me as a grad student.

Were you expected to publish in grad school?

There was virtually no emphasis on publishing as a grad student in my program. There was certainly no expectation that grad students would publish multiple articles in top-tier journals before completing the Ph.D., as there seems to be today. When I was finishing my dissertation and applying for jobs, the consensus seemed to be that you probably needed an article in hand to land a decent tenure-track job, especially if you weren’t coming out of Princeton. I had one paper based on my doctoral research forthcoming in Kant-Studien – a record that was perfectly respectable then but would be laughable by today’s standards.

Teaching?

At UCSD, grad students didn’t usually teach their own classes as instructors, but we did a lot of teaching as teaching assistants, within the department or in one of several college writing programs for undergrads. My first three years, I taught in a Humanities program offering interdisciplinary courses in history, philosophy, and literature, with a focus on major aspects of the Western humanistic tradition. The program consisted of a series of five classes, beginning with Israel and Greece, then moving on to Rome, Christianity, and the Middle Ages, and ending with Modernity. It was a huge amount of work – professors would lecture two or three times a week, and teaching assistants would teach two sections of twenty or so students twice each week, plus grade papers and exams. It was demanding, but it was such a fantastic, immersive learning experience having to read and teach a wide range of “great books” spanning the entire history of the Western tradition. After that, I was a TA in the Philosophy Department and then taught my own class on feminist perspectives on moral and political philosophy as I was finishing the program.

How did grad school hone your skills as a philosopher?

Every quarter, there were multiple graduate seminars offered, and grad students did a lot of coursework - much more so than in the program where I teach now. We didn’t just take seminars in our narrow area of focus, and there was a culture of continuing to participate actively in seminars while we were researching and writing the dissertation, which was after we had officially finished with the course requirements for the degree. I got a very broad education in the core areas of the discipline, and I had to learn to talk to students and faculty who weren’t working in my areas of research focus, which was a helpful skill to learn.

What was the job market like when you finished?

The job market was competitive and somewhat daunting, but by today’s standards, it was a walk in the park. For one thing, there wasn’t the extreme saturation problem there is today with too many overqualified candidates who’ve been out for several years, and with strong publication records, competing for starting positions alongside newly minted Ph.D.s. There were more jobs available, and there were far fewer applicants per position. I can recall being aware that there was no guarantee of getting a job, but I had the definite sense that things were likely to work out if I wrote a good dissertation, had strong letters, and interviewed well. And that’s certainly changed.

Good experience? Horror stories? Sexism?

When I was on the market, departments still held interviews at the Eastern APA, and the smoker still existed. The smoker was as cringe-inducing and distasteful as it’s often described, especially if you were a job candidate vying for the attention of some famous person or faculty member whom you perceived as capable of advancing your job prospects, even if only in a negligible way. People smoked too much, they drank too much, and junior people often looked queasy, desperate and miserable riding up and down the elevators.

My experience wasn’t horrible, but I’m happy I never have to relive it. I had several APA interviews, one of which involved being interviewed on a king-sized bed in a hotel room with an all-male interview team whose Chair said that even though the interview violated APA policy, he could get away with it because he was a minority. (The worst part of that one was figuring out how to sit upright - with my legs crossed - on a sinking mattress - in a skirt.) Another of my interviews involved a veiled inquiry into my religious affiliation (none!). There was one in which a well-known senior analytic metaphysician explained in detail why my dissertation work on Kant’s theory of virtue was a piece of garbage. But overall, my experience was right in the middle of other stories I heard, especially from other female grad students on the market.

Campus visits?

I had a few campus visits, which were mostly fine. I only remember one unpleasant car ride in which a conservative senior faculty member asked me if I was married (no) or planning to get married and have kids (no plans), and then complained about junior female colleagues who joined the department and then had children before getting tenure and about the fact that his daughter had just come out as a lesbian.

Advice?

In terms of advice for those seeking academic jobs, what I would say above all is that it would be a huge mistake to think that your worth as a person, philosopher, or scholar is reflected in any meaningful way in your success or failure on the market. The philosophy job market is a crapshoot in many ways, with luck and contingent forces beyond your control playing a significant role in how things ultimately turn out. What you can do is be well prepared, learn to communicate the value of your work to people who will have very little idea about your chosen area of research, and remind yourself that, in almost every case, you are the authority about your topic. Beyond that, I’d tell people it never hurts to have a Plan B!

Any major world events--political, technological, cultural changes or trends, etc.--that had a significant impact on your life and worldview during grad school?

I can barely recall any major world events that occurred at the time, although I can easily remember every grad seminar I took, the names of the other students in class, the topics of my presentations and final papers, the discussions we had, and what we did for fun outside of class. For better or worse, my focus was pretty narrowly fixed on learning how to teach, write, and present as a philosopher, completing a dissertation, and getting a job!

Largest change in your views, in grad school?

The biggest change had much less to do with the actual substance of my views than with my attachment to them and my understanding of the reasons for holding them.

Where did you land your first gig?

I was lucky to get a tenure-track job at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia the year I finished my degree. It was a great place to start my career. I had a 2/2 teaching load in a research department with some excellent colleagues who supported me and respected work in the history of philosophy. But to underscore the element of luck - the job at Virginia Tech for which I applied was an ethics job, and the search committee only became interested in me after Eric Watkins, a well-regarded expert on Kant, announced that he was leaving for a position at UCSD. If Watkins hadn’t decided to leave when he did, I would have never gotten the job because they didn’t need another person working on Kant.

Surprises at Virginia tech?

When I started teaching at Virginia Tech, I was surprised by how little correlation there was between the amount of time I spent preparing for class and how well it went. Hours spent pouring over the assigned reading, researching debates in the secondary literature, writing up detailed lectures notes and handouts - in no way did it guarantee a successful class. As with many things in life, I discovered that teaching tended to go better when I loosened my grip and abandoned any rigid expectations about what was supposed to happen, and instead showed up prepared to talk about the issues, with a good attitude, enthusiasm, and an open mind about what might unfold.

Low points?

Without a doubt, the lowest point of my time at Virginia Tech was being harassed by a senior colleague who threatened to kill my beloved dog, Stella, whom I brought to the office with me every day and who apparently annoyed him. I thought the guy was joking when he explained that he had done some research and had figured out how he could poison my little Jack Russell terrier, but then it turned out that he actually did attempt to kill some of the animals his neighbor kept outside on her farm by putting anti-freeze in their water troughs. That was unpleasant and rather unnerving. On the flipside, the experience of learning how to deal with a manifest sociopath with a victim mentality and thirst for revenge prepared me for dealing with future iterations of that type, which seem well-represented in academia.

Holy Toledo! What did you do?

For starters, I kept my office door locked at all times and made sure I was never in the department alone with the guy.  Beyond that, I learned it’s never worth it to try to reason with an angry person with antisocial personality disorder.

High points? What did you do for fun? Why did you leave?

Probably the most notable high point was the friendship I developed with Marjorie Grene, who had joined the department in the late 1980s when her daughter Ruth moved from Cornell to Virginia Tech. Marjorie was a brilliant trailblazer who made significant contributions in the history of philosophy, and who’s widely recognized in the field as one of the founding figures in the philosophy of biology. She lived a remarkable life – after getting her undergraduate degree in zoology at Wellesley in 1927, where she was one of only a handful of Jewish students on campus, she was an exchange student in Germany, studying with Heidegger and Jaspers before returning home in 1933 - the year Hitler came to power - and going on to earn her Ph.D. at Radcliffe. She had a long and esteemed academic career at U of Chicago, Queen’s University Belfast, and then as chair of Philosophy at UC-Davis, even remaining active during a fifteen-year hiatus when she raised her two children and ran the family farm in Ireland. Marjorie terrified me when she derailed my job talk at Virginia Tech, interrupting me about one paragraph into the paper I was reading and continuing to yell at me that the main issue between Kant and Schiller concerned their competing conceptions of freedom—something that was true, but that she thought I had failed to recognize. She could be intimidating and did not suffer fools, but happily, we ended up quickly developing a real friendship when I arrived on campus the next fall. She took me under her wing and was generous and kind, in her own uniquely charming way. I spent a lot of hours with her talking about the history of philosophy, Descartes and Kant, Jaspers and Heidegger, her work in existentialism, academia, her life more generally, and what it meant to share a worldview with someone. She had a wonderful sense of humor and an absolute fail-proof bullshit detector. I just absorbed a lot from her and am immensely grateful for the time we spent together.

So, good place to work overall?

All in all, Virginia Tech was a great place to work. The senior faculty in charge of the department were supportive of junior faculty and cared about our professional development and success. There were plenty of resources for research and travel. For me, it was a good job because the department had a strong tradition in the history of philosophy, and Kant was viewed as a central figure in the discipline.

What did you do in your spare time?

For fun, I enjoyed many wine-soaked events hosted by a wonderful independent wine store in town. I had the good fortune to be exposed to the great American heritage of old-time, bluegrass, and mountain gospel music in nearby Galax, Virginia, where I once learned to clog. I socialized with friends from the university, including a terrific group of younger philosophers from the department. And I got my dog Stella, my constant companion, who got me out into the gorgeous surrounding Blue Ridge Mountain area of Appalachia.

Why did you leave?

I left Virginia Tech primarily because I wanted to be in a place that wasn’t as isolated as Blacksburg - the closest metropolitan area was D.C., which was a four and a-half hour drive away - and I also wanted to be in a larger department with a Ph.D. program.

You’ve been at Washington University for some time now. Ever consider leaving?

This spring marks my fifteenth year in the department at Washington University in St. Louis. I’ve never entertained any serious thoughts of leaving, which must be a good sign.

Highlights?

Getting tenure was definitely a highlight – there’s sort of life before and life after tenure. That same year I was up for promotion, I was awarded a Faculty Fellowship at the Murphy Institute for Ethics and Public Affairs at Tulane (where I spent the following academic year) as well as a Charles Ryskamp Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies.

Those professional awards are obviously gratifying but serving as Director of Undergraduate Studies in my department for the past ten years has been rewarding in its own way. We have an incredible group of undergraduate students, and interacting with them, teaching them in class, getting to know them in office hours and around the department has been an ongoing source of intellectual fulfillment in my daily job.

Obstacles?

Managing to find the time to get it all done and then not beating myself up when it’s not possible!

How do you approach graduate mentorship? Advice for mentors?

I’m not big on dispensing advice, but at this point in my career I often think that we should all be doing whatever we can to encourage our students not to lose sight of the importance of being well-adjusted, well-rounded, functioning, happy adults. That said, I try not to impose my own views or aspirations. I try to help students figure out if they have a genuine love of philosophy apart from its professional trappings. And I try to remember that the people I’m dealing with are human beings with lives and with ambitions, desires, interests, and passions of their own and outside of academia.

What are you working on nowadays? Exciting new projects in the works? I heard you taught a class on happiness?

I’m working on a set of papers that will form the core of a longer project on Kant’s account of happiness – how he understands the concept of happiness, whether he even has a settled view of it, the value he thinks it holds, its relation to morality and virtue, and its importance for a complete human life. Kant says a number of puzzling and perhaps controversial things about happiness. In addition, he never offers a sustained treatment of it in the way he does with core aspects of his moral theory. So my project aims to give a systematic interpretation and assessment of Kant’s views concerning happiness and the role it plays in a broader Kantian ethics. Given that Kant thinks of virtue and happiness as our two fundamental ends, the monograph on Kantian happiness will be a sort of companion piece to my earlier work on Kantian virtue.

Sounds fascinating! How’d you come up with the idea?

I taught a graduate seminar on happiness a few years ago when I started thinking about Kant’s account of happiness and how it relates to other historical views, and that was great fun. We explored Plato’s adaptive conception of happiness in the Gorgias, the metaphysical/psychic conception of happiness in the Republic, Aristotle’s comprehensive account in the Nicomachean Ethics, and Stoic ideas about the identification of virtue and happiness before investigating Kant’s various discussions of happiness in the Groundwork, the Critique of Practical Reason, The Metaphysics of Morals, and the lectures on ethics. One thing I learned from that seminar is how difficult it is to make comparative assessments between Kant and the Ancients, in part because Kant often seems to misunderstand the views he criticizes, and in part because he uses the concept of happiness to signify something altogether different from ancient conceptions of happiness (eudaimonia).

I hear you. So, how do you feel about philosophy on the internet in general?

On the one hand, it’s extremely beneficial that there are now so many valuable philosophical resources widely available on the internet to specialists and generalists alike. On the other hand, if the question is about doing philosophy on the internet in the sense of winning arguments (especially via social media) - I feel much the same as I do about ice cubes in wine or Donald Trump in the White House - it doesn’t seem to belong there. When done responsibly, with a measure of reflection, common sense, and restraint, it’s perfectly fine. But philosophy is complex, contemplative, slow, and subject to continual revision. The internet is the opposite of those. So, proceed with caution.

In philosophy, are there views that are considered controversial that shouldn't be, in your estimation?

If non-naturalism about freedom of the will is still controversial, then it shouldn’t be.

Wow! So what do you think is going on in our heads when we act freely?

I’m heavily influenced by Kant and my former advisor Henry Allison on this point, but the basic idea is that thinking of ourselves as free (in some transcendental sense as Kant terms it) is a condition of thinking of ourselves as practical agents who deliberate and choose how to act. This is not a claim about what is metaphysically true about the will, but rather a conceptual point about how we’re constrained to think of ourselves when we think of ourselves as rational agents capable of morality.

Are you religious?

I’m not religious (sorry mom!). But I’m not dismissive of religion or people with religious belief, and I can see its appeal. I think of myself as basically agnostic—a person who claims neither faith nor disbelief in God.

Best philosopher you disagree most? Please, explain your answer!

Bernard Williams. Williams was brilliant, and I find his writing singularly engaging and inspiring. I try to include an essay of his in every undergraduate class I teach because the work itself is a testament to the power of philosophy – just look what philosophy can do! He made such important contributions to debates on moral psychology, personal identity, and character, and I so appreciate the marvelous literary quality of his deeply humane writing. And yet I disagree with most of his conclusions, especially his view about the nature of motivation and reasons for action, the weight he thinks ground projects bear in finding meaning in life, his skepticism about systematic moral theory, and his deflationary view about the value of morality in relation to other kinds of value.

What is the last belief you would give up in the face of recalcitrant observational evidence?

That’s easy! It would be the belief that human beings are capable of being motivated to do the morally good or right thing solely because it’s right, not because it satisfies some inclination they happen to have. That one I wouldn’t abandon even in the face of seemingly overwhelming observational or anecdotal evidence that we’re always motivated on the basis of inclination to do what will promote our own self-interest or happiness!

How do you define philosophy?

Rational inquiry as a guide for uncovering theoretical knowledge about the world and practical wisdom about how to live.

What would your teenage self make of your current self?

How did you get so lucky?

How do you explain what you do to non-philosophers?

The choices seem to be to reduce it to an empty sound bite or to confuse people. I start by saying that I’m a philosopher and teach at a university. If they follow up by asking what exactly I study, I say that my areas of focus are the history of philosophy and ethics. If they’re interested in further specifics about the content of my teaching and research, I say that because my main interests are in moral theory, I’m concerned with issues concerning the nature of morality, moral motivation and reasons for action, the requirements for moral character and virtue, what it means to be a good person and why it matters, and how all of that relates to happiness. Nine times out of ten, when that paired down, basic account seems to register with someone, their response is usually something along the lines of, “Right! That sounds familiar – I studied psychology one semester in college.”

Ha! Do you feel like your work in philosophy has practical applications? Why should people study it?

Given that my own work is primarily focused on Kant studies and theoretical ethics, it’s not practical in any straightforward or obvious sense. Still, I do think it has broader practical value insofar as people are always better off in life if they’re able to gain clarity about what has value or meaning and why, and if they’re able to use theoretical and practical reason to govern their thought and action. People should study philosophy because it’s the best chance we have for overcoming the multitude of powerful obstacles to thinking and living well.

How do you see the future of philosophy? Exciting trends?

Things that I find exciting and that give me hope are:

--The excellent comparative work being done in the history of philosophy.

--The uncovering of neglected voices of women scholars in modern philosophy especially.

--The explosion of first-rate, rigorous Nietzsche scholarship over the past twenty or so years.

--The burgeoning high-quality contemporary work in feminist philosophy and philosophy of race and their move from the margins.

Disconcerting trends?

Things that I personally find disconcerting, even depressing, include:

--The overwhelming pressure to publish too much and too early.

--The increasing gatekeeping tendencies of the profession and an alarmingly narrow conformism about what’s “good” and who gets to decide.

--The fact that so many philosophers write like Martians, and not human beings.

Is philosophy dying? If not, what could kill it?

Philosophy might be out of favor in some circles, especially in a consumer culture in which education is viewed narrowly as a means to a conventional career path and a guaranteed stable income. But, overall, I think philosophy is alive and for the most part well. The only thing that could kill it would be the complete and utter annihilation of the human race.

Favorite books? Movies?

My favorite classics are Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary, Middlemarch, Lolita, Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, Pride and Prejudice, To the Lighthouse, The Stranger, and Beloved. I love the short stories of Flannery O’Connor, Grace Paley, Joy Williams, Alice Munro, and Jhumpa Lahiri, and I’m crazy for anything by J.M. Coetzee, whose writing is a deep well of insight about moral psychology.

If I had to narrow it down to thirty favorite films that I enjoy watching over and over again, they would be: On the Waterfront, Some Like it Hot, Belle de Jour, 8 ½, The Godfather, The Godfather II, Taxi Driver, Mean Streets, Goodfellas, 2001: Space Odyssey, E.T. – The Extraterrestrial, Annie Hall, Manhattan, Hannah and Her Sisters, Do the Right Thing, Blood Simple, The Big Lebowski, Fargo, Howard’s End, Life is Beautiful, The Piano, Schindler’s List, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, All About My Mother, American Beauty, Eyes Wide Shut, The Talented Mr. Ripley, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Requiem for a Dream, and In the Mood for Love. Oh, one more – Moonstruck – and please don’t judge me!

Hey we have very similar taste in (most) movies! Favorite music?

I’ve forgotten what music I enjoy. The recurring soundtrack in our home is dictated by our four-year old, whose musical taste revolves around “Baby Beluga” by Rafi, “Car Wash” by Rose Royce, “Buffalo Soldier” by Bob Marley, “Yellow Submarine” by The Beatles, “The Thunder Rolls” by Garth Brooks, and “Brown Chicken, Brown Cow” by Trace Adkins. I might get him some earbuds so he can start listening alone.

Ha! Baby Beluga is my universe right now. TV shows?

We are living in a Golden Age of television, and I’m an unabashed enthusiast of the medium! My favorites include The Sopranos, The Wire, Sex and the City, The Americans, Breaking Bad, Ozark, Westworld, Girls, Transparent, Catastrophe, Broad City, Fleabag, Insecure, Killing Eve, and Better Things, the splendid brainchild of the brilliant Pam Adlon.

We are on the same page! Fine art?

As for art, I have an abiding affection for 19th century Impressionism and Post-Impressionism painting – especially Pissaro, Caillebotte, Manet, Cezanne, Morisot, Cassatt, and Seurat – and I’ve recently discovered an appreciation of early 20th Century German Expressionism.

What do you do in your spare time nowadays?

I drink alcohol and sleep. I used to have a slightly more ambitious set of hobbies that included books, films, art, food, (occasional) exercise, and travel, but my wife and I have a four-year old son, Cooper, so right now most of my time outside of work is spent playing with Hot Wheels and race tracks and devising imaginary strategies for ridding our house of the faceless gray monster who inhabits my son’s bedroom, preventing him from sleeping in his own bed through the night.

How did you and your wife meet? What does she do?

I met my wife at a philosophy department party hosted by my former colleague John Doris. Marissa had majored in philosophy and political science as an undergraduate at WashU and was still in touch with people in my department when she moved back to St. Louis after getting her degree at Harvard Law. She has a successful practice in environmental law at a big law firm in town, and she does a lot of great work on behalf of animals as President of the board of a wonderful shelter, the Animal Protective Agency of Missouri.

Does having kids inform your philosophy, and does your philosophy inform your parenting?

Having a child has given me patience I never knew I had, and it’s completely changed the way I view time. In the simple words of the late poet Mary Oliver, the main thing I’ve learned is: “Things take the time they take. Don’t worry.”

As for how philosophy informs my parenting, although it’s not always deliberate, I find myself explaining things to Cooper as if he’s a fully formed person. When our dog died, Cooper was two-years old. I told him the dog was old and unwell, she died, and she’s not coming back. Right now, we’re in our sixth week home in isolation due to the COVID-19 crisis. When we received the stay-at-home order, we discovered that many of our friends were telling their young kids that spring break had been extended and that’s why everyone was home. By contrast, my message to him was: “There’s a worldwide pandemic, we’re all going to die, and for now we have to stay at home and wash our hands constantly.” My son was totally non-plussed and took it all in stride. He doesn’t seem distressed by my tendency to tell him the truth, although he probably does talk about death more than the average four-year-old.

What was your election night like in 2016?

Election night 2016 – otherwise known as the place where dreams go to die! What can I say other than it was a night of absolute, abject misery? Like most of the people I know, I was shocked, genuinely stunned that Trump won. The day had started off on such a high, when my wife and I took our then one-year old son with us to vote at our polling place in the city of St. Louis, where everyone in sight was clearly supporting HRC. That evening we were at a party with other Democrats to celebrate Clinton’s historic victory when the results started to roll in, and we left early, in willful denial about what was to come. We put our son to bed, and I stayed awake the entire night watching the horror unfold on cable news, drinking cheap red wine and stress-eating an entire pepperoni pizza, barking about the latest poll results, the only logical explanation for it all (Sexism! Misogyny!), and the impending downfall of our fair Republic to my wife, who had the good sense to go to bed.

My wife went to bed early too! What was the rest of the week like for you?

For me, the following week (or weeks) was a period of existential angst, a time of feeling not at home in the world. I felt like a stranger in a foreign land, wondering if America had a death wish. I’m honestly still amazed when I think about it.

I hear you. Who are you rooting for in 2020? I was a Warren supporter, but now that Biden is the nominee, I’m rooting for him to deliver us from four more years of the malignant monster-child currently playing tyrant in the Oval Office.

Last meal?

It would start with a round or two of my favorite classic cocktail from my favorite bar – French 75s (with cognac, not gin!) from the French 75 bar attached to Arnaud’s restaurant in New Orleans’ French Quarter. I’d savor those alongside their divine bar snacks, especially the gougéres, stuffed shrimp, and soufflé potatoes. Those aren’t light, plus I wouldn’t want to leave this world weighed down with a heavy conscience about having just consumed meat, so the main meal would be spectacular seafood, perhaps a towering Plateau de Fruits de Mer from Brittany, served cold with champagne. I don’t have a sweet tooth, so I’d skip dessert altogether and end the evening with extraordinary cheese, preferably from France. (I note that in contemplating my last meal, I’m much more concerned about not eating meat than my carbon footprint!) If it came down to it, though, I’d like to think that I wouldn’t care too much about the food, as long as I was surrounded by close friends and family, especially my wife, our son, and our dogs, and as long as there was an abundance of fine champagne flowing freely for the duration of the evening. I could die happy then, plus I wouldn’t suffer the next morning’s hangover from having drunk too much champagne!

If you could ask an omniscient being one question, and be sure you were going to get an honest, comprehensible answer, what would it be?

Who stole my treasured, perfectly broken-in Birkenstocks from outside my door room my senior year of college? That’s a recurring question that’s continued to haunt me over the years, largely due to the irony of having a fellow classmate sneak up to my secluded senior suite on the fifth floor of Schaffer Hall in broad daylight to filch a pair of worn-in sandals when I was Chief Justice of the college, in charge of handling infractions of the college honor code, including stealing!

On a more serious note, I’d ask whether there was any reason to hope that people ultimately get the happiness they deserve, or is that merely wishful thinking on the part of finite imperfect creatures motivated by some broadly Kantian expectation about just desserts in a morally benevolent universe?

[interviewer: Cliff Sosis]