What Is It Like to Be a Philosopher?

In this interview, Audrey Yap, Associate Professor at the University of Victoria, talks about growing up in Vancouver, Buddhism, the relationality of identity, taekwondo, depression, emo poetry, Tori Amos, going to the University of British Columbia, getting good at things, working at Starbucks, being encouraged to go to grad school, Stanford, 9/11, the history of algebra, working with Michael Friedman and Solomon Feferman, wushu, déformation professionnelle, Jobs for Philosophers, landing a job at University of Victoria, the inspirational work of Susan Brison, decarceration, teaching philosophy in jail, doing analytic philosophy instead of going to counselling, the joys of co-writing and helping other people figure stuff out, Marcus Aurelius, socially engaged philosophy, Indigo Girls, The Expendables, Ursula Le Guin, and her last meal…

[5/12/2022]

So, where did you grow up? What was your family like?

I grew up in Vancouver (the one in Canada), although I was born in Singapore, and my family is Malaysian Chinese. Several of my dad’s siblings and their families had already immigrated to Canada, and we ended up joining them there when I was really young. In lots of ways I suspect we were a pretty typical middle class immigrant family – though I wish I’d grown up speaking Cantonese as well as English – me and most of my cousins never learned it as kids, even though our parents are all fluent speakers. One of my aunts once told me it was a conscious decision on their part to make sure we didn’t have any accents so we could fit in properly in Canada.

Religious household?

Not especially, but I guess I grew up as a Chinese New Year Buddhist? The way that some people only go to church at Christmas and Easter, but every year, I go to the Buddhist temple (often the same one in Vancouver, which I’m fortunately only a few hours away from now) every Chinese New Year. I think I’m probably more of a Buddhist now that I’ve actually read about some of the philosophy than I was when I was a kid.

What do you dig about Buddhism?

I’m definitely no expert, but there’s lots that I love about Buddhist philosophies. Just as an example, I see a lot of anti-essentialism in them. There’s different ways to interpret the idea of no-self – a lot of people emphasize that it denies an unchanging, permanent soul. But for me the most interesting thing is the extent to which we (or at least who we think we are) can’t really be separated from the rest of the world. It runs against the idea of an atomistic and independent self – and I think that fits nicely with a lot of feminist philosophers who argue for the relationality of our identity, and point out the huge extent to which we depend on each other and the world around us for all kinds of things.

I think that all helps me personally, but makes me a worse analytic philosopher. The methods of analytic philosophy often love to separate individuals from their particular contexts and environments. But I think there’s an increasingly strong sense in which I can’t even make sense of who I am as an individual that’s genuinely separable from the important relationships and environments in which I’m situated. So that’s the direction that lots of the philosophy, including Buddhist philosophy, has been pushing me.

As a little kid, what were you interested in?

Probably martial arts were the most constant thing in my life when I was a kid. My dad thought I was too shy, and so signed me up for taekwondo lessons together with some family friends’ kids. I guess it stuck, since now I’m a taekwondo coach. Later on in junior high, I was also a competitive wrestler. It was a bit weird – I’m not sure why I got into competitive martial arts, since nobody else in the family was into anything similar, but my dad did drive me to plenty of tournaments down in Washington state back in the day. Besides that, I’m not really sure! I didn’t have a ton of friends and I don’t have siblings, so like most nerdy kids, I just read all the time. Mostly science fiction and fantasy. I do joke sometimes though that I was raised by the family dogs, because I probably spent more time with them than with kids my own age.

As a teenager, did you get into any trouble? Favorite subjects in high school? What was on your mind in general? Did you start thinking about what you wanted to do in college?

Yikes, I don’t know if I liked anything in high school. I was pretty good at school without trying super hard, but I don’t know that I was passionate about any of it. Mostly I was a really depressed kid who didn’t know where I fit in but really wanted to. Looking back now, I was a classic case of a self-harming teenager. Totally self-destructive and self-hating. I don’t know how much of that was obvious to any of the adults in my life, since I think lots of teenagers are messed up and just trying to figure things out. But I definitely wasn’t ok, all the way through school. If I hadn’t been in an environment where people expected kids with good grades to apply to university, I probably wouldn’t have. I just applied to do the same thing as some of my friends were doing, because I don’t think it ever really occurred to me to try and build a life for myself that I might want to live. It never occurred to me to make plans, I think, or to think beyond working my minimum wage barista job. For me that just meant applying to the two universities that were local to Vancouver, and I went to the one that the people I knew went to and did the same thing as them. Honestly, the only reason I ended up in Philosophy was because I applied to a general arts program, Arts One at UBC, where a particular faculty member was in charge of smaller groups, and I happened to end up with a philosopher as my faculty member. That was the first time I heard of philosophy as any kind of academic discipline, but it seemed interesting, so I took more of it.

If the person you were when you graduated high school met the person you are now, what would she recognize? What would surprise her?

Probably most things about my life would surprise her, except that I still love dogs and still have chronic depression. She’d probably be surprised at how ordinary and boring my life is, though - I pay my bills on time and I’ve stopped writing terrible emo poetry (thankfully). I expect it would be surprising to her that I went back to martial arts and that I’m physically active again. Maybe she’d be secretly pleased, though, that I didn’t end up self-destructing after all.

Emo poetry? I’m down. What were you listening to in high school?

Probably the same thing as every other depressed 90s kid. Tori Amos, Depeche Mode, Portishead. But in better moods, I also grew up on the punk of the time, like NOFX, Rancid, Propagandhi. That probably gives you a picture of just what the poetry was and why nobody should ever read it again.

Love Portishead, Tori Amos! You're still depressed. Run in the family? Consider therapy? Anti-depressants? Sorry for asking, people don’t talk about this stuff enough!

I don’t know if it runs in the family. It’s not the kind of thing my family really talks about. I’ve been to therapy a few times, and have sometimes found it beneficial. I’d go again, but don’t think I really have the commitment for it right now. Mostly I just take anti-depressants and manage myself as best I can. That makes it sound like I’m struggling to get by, but I’m really not. I’m pretty happy with a lot of my life, but I know there’s something about my health that I just know I have to keep an eye on.

Healthy attitude! What was UBC like?

Definitely not as easy as high school, but a lot more interesting, because I was finally being challenged. A lot of the people I knew from high school who were also going to university went to UBC as well, and because I had no idea what I was doing, I signed up for whatever program they signed up for, and it happened to be Arts One. I only now realise what a great and innovative program it is, by the way! At the time, I didn’t have any points of comparison! This combined big lectures with smaller classrooms and one-on-one tutorials, and was most of my first year program.

Did you have a definite idea of what you wanted to do?

Most of my undergrad involved flailing around. When it came to declaring a major, I thought I might try to do a double honours degree in English and Philosophy because I was getting pretty good grades in both, but then I messed up the application deadline for English so they couldn’t accept me. So I went with just philosophy instead. Even then I thought for a while I might switch to Math or Computer Science, but I just ended up with a minor in Computer Science instead, because I found programming pretty fun and was good at logic.

So were you a good student?

I don’t know if I really grew as a student so much as I stumbled around and eventually got better at a handful of things.

What did your parents make of your decision to major in philosophy?

By that point, my dad had moved back to Malaysia, and we weren’t especially close then. I don’t think my mother really minded what I did with my life - I mean she had had to spend her post-divorce years figuring a lot of that out for herself, and I’m sure she had her own problems. I’m lucky in some ways that I was pretty independent and didn’t have any kinds of care responsibilities. So since I was a scholarship student, I managed to get by working pretty much full time hours at Starbucks to pay my rent. I guess I didn’t feel like I had to justify my choices to my parents since they weren’t on the hook for them, financially. So I got to spend plenty of those years doing pretty irresponsible things to a body that I now take much better care of, grateful that it wasn’t the age of social media, or the present overdose crisis in my province.

When did you start thinking about grad school?

I would never even have considered grad school (I didn’t really know what it was) if one of my undergrad mentors hadn’t suggested I apply, and even told me where to go. So when I got tenure, I knitted him a “thank you for my whole career path” present, which is a little reversible soft toy that’s a duck on one side and a rabbit on the other. I think it still lives in one of the UBC seminar rooms.

You got into Stanford! Was this exciting? Scary?

I couldn’t believe it. It was the norm where I grew up to just apply to university near where you live, so the American culture of choosing schools was totally foreign to me. That meant I’d never even considered applying to a place like that, much less thought about what it would be like to go there. I defended my PhD thesis in 2006 and I’m still secretly afraid someone will tell me they made a mistake and never meant to accept me in the first place.

Was grad school what you expected? Was grad school in general, or writing the dissertation, challenging?

I moved to the US for grad school the week after 9/11. That was disorienting and terrifying. Not just because I actually knew some people who lived in New York City, but because the US’s reaction showed me a lot (I was really naïve at the time) about just what military and political power meant.

I had no idea what to expect out of grad school. I don’t think I knew anyone besides my professors who had ever been, and somehow it never occurred to me to ask. I think some of my family was a bit annoyed that I was staying in school still, instead of doing something – I actually don’t know what they expected, maybe getting married and having kids? – more productive with my life. I had a really hard time my first few years in grad school, though. I don’t think I was well prepared to be there, and I felt incredibly behind everyone else most of the time. I actually don’t think that feeling has ever gone away!

But I had never written a big project like the dissertation before, and I had absolutely no idea how to go about it. I think I’m extra hands-on with my graduate students now, even when some of them don’t need me to be, partly to help protect them from feeling as lost and unsure as I did.

What was Stanford like?

I spent a lot of time around logicians, Kantians, and philosophers of science. I took a lot of logic, because I thought for a while I would research in it. But every time I came up with a potential research question, even for a seminar paper, it seemed like Sol Feferman had already given a proof of it in the 60s. So I lost steam pretty quickly. I also spent a surprising amount of time reading and writing on Kant. But we had all these people especially - Allen Wood, Michael Friedman, Lanier Anderson, and Tamar Schapiro - who were all fantastic scholars and experts on different aspects of Kant’s philosophy. So maybe I just couldn’t help it.

How’d you choose what to focus on?

One of the things that was interesting about Stanford then - but maybe also reflects the real lack of experience I had with the wider field of philosophy - was just how much I took for granted. I certainly took it for granted that to do any philosophy of science or mathematics, I would have to have a really solid grounding in the science or mathematics that I was engaging with. My dissertation was in the philosophy of math (on the history of algebra more specifically), and with the support of my advisors, I took several classes in the math department to make sure I actually knew enough about the math that I was writing about. But since my co-supervisors for it were Solomon Feferman and Michael Friedman, with incredible expertise and credentials in mathematics and physics, respectively, it seemed like an extremely natural move.

You don’t do history of algebra nowadays…

Even though what I research these days seems worlds away from the history of algebra, I think that general approach to philosophical research has stuck with me. I tend to get lost very quickly with any philosophy that’s too far removed from the world as it’s experienced, or from the practices of actual people. Though I think these days I notice this more when it comes to people who philosophize about gender. I don’t think I really get the approach that comes up with gender-concepts somewhat a priori and then tries to argue about the extent to which different people satisfy them. Especially when there’s such a rich variety of experiences related to gender that people are having in the world that philosophy could help us make sense of - I don’t know what motivates people to take approaches that just seem to erase or deny those.

Were you encouraged to publish? What were your fellow grad students like? Who did you hang out with and what did you do to unwind?

We weren’t encouraged to publish, but I did co-write a paper on the Vienna Circle with one of my fellow grad students, Angela Potochnik. She’s now a fantastic philosopher of science doing great work in Cincinnati. I did spend time with the other grad students. There was a cohort of logic students, and several women in the year that joined just after me, several of whom are still professional philosophers. But probably what got me through grad school was my martial arts community. I was really serious about my taekwondo training then, and when Stanford had a Pac West team during my fifth year, I was team captain. I was also a competitive wushu athlete at the time for about three years. I’m a taekwondo coach now and still spar plenty with my athletes, but I don’t think my knees would hold up to wushu like they did in my 20s.

 Advice for graduate students?

Largely because of how much martial arts sustained me then, I do always advise my grad students (and any grad students) to make sure they maintain something in their life that’s important to them and identity-constituting other than school. I think academia has this way of taking over your sense of self, and trying to overwrite all the other narratives you might have about who you are and what your value is in the world - so if you don’t have some other source of value that you’re actively cultivating, academic rejection will hit you extra hard. And I think we all know that rejection is just an ordinary part of academic life, and if you don’t have a super robust sense of self-worth in the first place, it can be easy for that to wreck you. Some of them will have music, art, or important relationships, and I’ll always tell them that if they need to de-prioritize academics sometimes to sustain those, they should do that.

Job market woes?

The first and only time I went to the Eastern APA in the Bad Old Days, someone thought I was Friedman’s personal assistant instead of his PhD student. That was nice. We also didn’t have a ton of women in the department then, so it was either Krista Lawlor or Debra Satz I think who warned us about not wearing skirts just in case you were stuck in an interview in a room where you had to sit on the bed.

But I lucked out immensely. I wasn’t quite ready for a job market season since I didn’t have a full draft of my dissertation when the Jobs for Philosophers came out, but the University of Victoria’s logician had just retired early, and they were advertising for someone with exactly my profile. We decided that I could take a chance on a small number of applications that seemed like decent fits. I’m also Canadian, and there are various immigration rules that make it a bit easier for us to get hired in Canadian departments. So I did end up on the short list here. I wasn’t the first person they offered the position to (I don’t know that the chair at the time was supposed to spill that news to me but he did anyway), but I was at least the first one who accepted it, and here I am still.

How have your experiences influenced your philosophical views?

I started writing about gendered violence because I was trying to work through my own experiences of it. Nowhere near as courageously so as Susan Brison, but I guess some of us will literally do analytic philosophy instead of go to therapy. Anyway, I’ve been in a few relationships that were pretty damaging for me. Once, confronting an ex about this, they said (more or less), “I couldn’t possibly have done that to you because I’m not a monster.” And in fact, the more open I was about this, the more other women told me about experiences they’ve had along those same lines. I think a lot of where I’m at now in my thinking about gendered violence has been a very extended attempt to take this exchange seriously.

And a lot of what has lead me to anti-carceral thinking has actually been my own feelings about the people who have hurt me in my life, and the total inadequacy of our current systems. I was seeing a guy on and off, (rapidly sliding towards off because of his relationship to various substances), and he got picked up by the police because he was drunk and causing a disturbance at a club. He was a big, clean-cut looking white guy, and I guess there were no charges, so they just kept him in the drunk tank until he sobered up. So middle of the night they call me to come and get him. Which of course I did, since it never occurred to me to refuse. It wasn’t until much later that I thought about how irresponsible it was for them to do that, and how they never even asked me if I felt safe about the whole thing (I didn’t, really). I think I can take care of myself in a lot of physical situations, but they still got me to come and get a drunk and disorderly man who probably outweighed me by a good 80 lbs. I’m a small-ish woman, I’ve always thought the cops weren’t incredibly likely to hurt me, but I guess this did drive home the idea that they wouldn’t really have stopped some boyfriend from hurting me either.

My interactions with individual police officers have always been fine. I’m lucky that way. But I don’t think the carceral system actually keeps us safe.

Philosophical accomplishments at University of Victoria?

The philosophical thing I’m proudest of is probably getting a prison education program off the ground. I taught a class in Fall 2019 with a mixture of UVic students and students who were incarcerated at our local correctional centre. This is cheating a bit, since really I’m proud of the students themselves. But I had been going in to the jail on a super informal basis for about a year before that, just bringing in assorted philosophy readings, and I feel like that persistence helped me build some good relationships in there that made the class run more smoothly. I was looking at the booklet of final projects just the other day, and they still make me cry. I just taught an online version of during the pandemic, so the next step is making sure it’s getting offered on a regular basis.

I’m also super proud of me and my students every time they tell me (after a ton of struggle) that they finally get something I’d been trying to teach them. I teach introductory and intermediate logic most years, so I get to have lots of struggle and lots of awesome aha moments every year. I put a lot of time into helping students through problems since there’s a lot of them, but it’s gratifying for me too to see them figure it out.

Awesome. Any writing you are particularly proud of?

A piece of philosophical writing of mine that I still really like is my 2017 paper in FPQ on credibility excess, the social imaginary, and gendered violence. I wrote that instead of going to trauma counselling, and I would reframe some things in it now. But its basic argument is that we should strongly resist characterizing perpetrators of gendered violence as monsters. I don’t argue that we should do this for their sake, but instead because it has bad epistemic consequences. Believing that you have to be a monstrous person to commit that kind of act will lead us to accord disproportionate amounts of credibility to golden-boy types, or people who have been nice to us or treated us well in the past. So even though it’s kind of rough to really have to believe that anyone’s capable of seriously harming another person, I think that really is the messy and complicated world we live in.

This idea is making its way into a book, and has been over the past year and some. I’m co-writing it with Barrett Emerick, who is a wonderful friend as well as other half of my writing brain. One of my favourite feelings about co-authoring with Barrett is that sometimes when I read over our old stuff, I (a) really like it and (b) don’t really know who wrote which bit. Sometimes you can tell because I put too many commas in, but I make up for it with the fact that I use a reference manager for citations. Anyway, the book is an argument for decarceration based in feminist philosophy - especially Jean Harvey’s work on moral solidarity and Hilde Lindemann’s work on personhood. But we also draw a lot on abolitionists like Mariame Kaba.

How have you evolved philosophically and personally?

Since I have tenure and a secure job, I don’t have to care as much about getting credit for things. Ever since I was a grad student, I’ve always thought I was better at helping other people think through their ideas than I was at generating new or ground-breaking things of my own. I used to be ashamed of that, but now that I’ve got students of my own, it’s one of my favourite skills to use. I love talking to students (and really anyone) about their ideas, and helping them work things out. So I’m grateful that I’m in a position where I can do that. This parallels my athletic (what do you call it when it’s not your job? Is it still a career?) career super closely. I started my job at UVic when I turned 27, which also meant moving away from my taekwondo team and my coach. It was hard when I still wanted to be a serious athlete but had no way to do that. It wasn’t until my mid 30’s that some friends of mine opened a school (dojang) in town and I could have a team again. But now that I’m much older, I don’t have competitive ambitions anymore. But I can still be motivated to be a better athlete so I can be a better coach and training partner for my kids. So I’ve tried really hard in the last several years to become a person who’s trying hard to bring up a community and not just themselves. We’re often so conditioned to think of improvement and success as this hyper-individual thing, but I just can’t think of it that way anymore. Maybe this is just me trying to live in to not really believing in individual selves anymore.

What is your writing routine?

I love that you asked this, as though I had one, instead of living in a constant state of “wait, what’s happening now??”

Ha! Most underrated philosopher?

I really have no ability to answer this question! There are so many professional philosophers whose work I love, but I have learned so much philosophy from people who have basically no connection to professional philosophy! One of the best and most nuanced discussions I’ve ever been part of on gender and masculinity was reading Marcus Aurelius with a bunch of guys in jail. And I teach a critical thinking unit every year for our Uni 101 program at UVic (free, non-credit education for people who’ve experienced barriers to it) and learn something new every time. So maybe I’ll say that the most underrated philosophers I’ve met are the ones who’ve been told implicitly or explicitly their whole lives that that they’re not smart, that intellectual pursuits aren’t for them, and that their thoughts just aren’t as valuable as the thoughts of people with more privilege and education.

What is philosophy?

I got asked this at a job interview and it’s giving me scary flashbacks.

Ha! Sorry. Exciting and disconcerting trends in philosophy? How do you see the future of philosophy?

I love how normal it is to be doing socially engaged philosophy. I never even managed to take a class in feminist philosophy when I was a student, and now I meet all these people doing PhDs in the coolest, most interesting stuff. Philosophy still feels very conservative to me overall, but also has the potential to become something much more expansive. If we’re not all shut down by a pandemic and/or late stage capitalism or something, that is.

What music are you listening to nowadays?

Most of the pandemic it’s been pretty low key white-people-and-guitars acoustic and indie stuff. Sometimes when I’m having Big Feelings, I go back to my playlist of all the 90’s music that should have at least hinted to my younger self I was kinda queer - like Dar Williams, Indigo Girls, Tori Amos. You know (or at least, if you know, you know).

Movies? TV?

I don’t watch Really Good Movies or TV. I don’t cope well with watching genuine-feeling pain on screen, and I spend enough time thinking about worldly horrors in my research life. So I will watch pretty much every fancy superhero movie that comes out, and all kinds of really appalling action movies. I love that shit. If I need an excuse, it’s because I have teenagers in my life who are into Marvel and Star Wars, so obviously I need to keep myself well informed. Still, when my dogs got scared because people were setting off fireworks in the neighbourhood, I put on The Expendables at high volume and it made things better for all of us.

Though at the risk of destroying all of my abolitionist credibility, I have an unreasonable love for police procedurals, especially the gritty Scandinavian ones, in pretty much all media forms. There’s basically no excuse for it.

Who are these teenagers in your life?

They’re the kids I coach at taekwondo. I’ve known some of them since they were quite young, and there’s great photographic evidence of them gradually outgrowing me over the years. Having my own children never ended up being a thing for me, but it’s such a gift getting to be in these kids’ lives and seeing them grow into amazing human beings.

Books (not philosophy)?

I guess I don’t read a lot of Good Literature, now that you have me thinking about it. Besides the terrible mystery novels, I grew up on sci fi and fantasy (there were a lot of librarian moms around in my youth!) so I read a lot of that too when I can. And the sci fi and fantasy now is so much better than the stuff I grew up with. Now I can read so much more stuff by women (ok but seriously, 40-year-old nerds, how old were you when you realised that Tracy Hickman was a man?), people of colour, Indigenous writers, LGBTQ+ writers, and the worlds are way richer for it. I’ll always love Le Guin and Butler, but now there’s just so much more.

Last meal?

Tricky. Let’s say Buddhist vegetarian dim sum (Vancouver has some great places), but shared with the people and other creatures I love most in the world.

If you could ask an omniscient being one question and get an honest answer, what would it be?

What would it take for us, together, to heal?

[interviewer: Cliff Sosis]