What Is It Like to Be a Philosopher?

In this interview, Valerie Tiberius, Professor of Philosophy at University of Minnesota, talks about ruminating on the problem of evil at 5, reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance in high school, Prince, thinking about nuclear proliferation and getting into ethics at University of Toronto, feminism, what it is like for a Canadian to adjust to life at Chapel Hill, Hume, minesweeper, Blackburn, well-being and value fulfillment, imposter syndrome, the Good Place, Cunk on Earth, and what she would do if she were queen of the world…

[5/4/23]

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

I grew up in Toronto and various Toronto suburbs (though I lived in LA from about 3-5 and Philadelphia when I was 2). My Dad was an academic -- an educational psychologist with a love of philosophy. He's retired now and does oil paintings of trees full time. My mother is an artist -- painting (people and now extremely colorful abstracts), sculpture, poetry. I grew up with a younger sister who is 3 1/2 years younger than me.  I also have a half-sister who is 21 years younger!

As a little kid, what were you interested in? How were you similar to, and different from, the rest of your friends and family?

My sister and I used to build imaginary worlds from lumber we took from my dad's tool room and lego kits, and whatever else we could find. We'd join all the furniture with lumber "roads" and pretend the brown carpet was the ocean. I was interested in that! I also read a lot, as is probably true for most kids who end up being academics. My dad and I thought the same way -- we had a lot of discussions, including one about why we didn't go to church. I got the problem of evil when I was five.

 That’s a pretty good sign you might have a philosophical temperament! Did you enjoy high school? Interests? Were you a reflective teenager?

I really enjoyed high school. I went to a public high school that had a reputation for being rather alternative. I took a lot of theater classes and performed a lot in plays and musicals. I was Alice in a musical version of Alice in Wonderland. I also took a lot of English literature classes in which we read things like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and An Unknown Woman: A Journey to Self-Discovery. I was fascinated by books that were about the self and self-exploration. So, yes, I guess I was a hyper-reflective teenager. I really loved to sing in high school. Some friends of mine started an event called Swé (an acronym for Some Wonderful Entertainment; pronounced Sway) and I used to sing with various other people and various guitarist friends.

What music did you listen to in high school?

A lot of folk singers like Joni Mitchell and Janis Ian. I've always loved beautiful female voices and harmony. The Rolling Stones, Queen, Pink Floyd, CSNY. Prince! Eighties pop -- I taught aerobics through high school and college, so I needed to be up on pop music with a beat. I saw Duran Duran in concert in high school, but under duress. I had a boyfriend who was really into punk so I listened to some of that, but didn't like it very much. For instance I saw Foetus at a bar in Toronto. They had a song called "Scraping Foetus off the Wheel" and, as I recall, the singer was too high to perform. I also had friends in bands, so I went to hear them. I went to high school with the guys in Moxy Fruvous some of whom (back then) had a band called Tall New Buildings. Subsequently, one of those guys became a talk show host on Canadian public radio and was involved in an ugly sexual harassment scandal.

Hey, I like Foetus! So, did you start thinking about college?

College was a given for me. It never would have occurred to me not to go.

Where did you apply? What was the plan?

I applied to the University of Toronto, where my Dad was a prof. and I had free tuition. I'm not sure I applied anywhere else, since UofT was a great school, my parents both went there, and did I mention the free tuition? I didn't have a plan. It makes me a bit sad that students these days have to have such plans. I just went off to college hoping I'd find some new things interesting. I realize now that freedom was a great privilege.

Favorite classes and inspirational teachers at University of Toronto?

My first inspiration in college was Charles Stevenson from whom I took intro to philosophy. He would stand outside the classroom with a small group of students for as long as we wanted to talk with him. I remember him telling us how he managed his migraine pain with a mixture of Stoicism and mindful attention. I also remember the first philosophy paper I wrote for him on free will and moral responsibility: The Fatalistic Pot Smoker. Prof. Stevenson got me hooked, but without Doug Hutchinson who taught ancient philosophy, I doubt I would have gone to graduate school. He was an amazing teacher and mentor.

What did you do for fun? Love?

As stereotypical as it probably sounds, I really did love talking about ideas with friends during college. Everything was new and exciting! Less stereotypically, I dated someone for 2+ years who wasn't a student and we did a lot of outdoor stuff -- x-country skiing, cycling, hiking. I learned to wind-surf with my Dad (though I never got very good at it).

Any major world events that had a significant impact on your life in college?

I volunteered for anti-nuclear arms groups in college. I think the movie The Day After had a profound effect on me. I was terrified by that movie (I think it aired when I was 15 -- it was one of those things that everyone watched). I did a double major in philosophy and environmental studies, which makes me think I was influenced by the environmental movement, but there wasn't the kind of attention to those issues that there is now. Acid rain was in the news, but most people my age didn't have the feeling of impending doom that I see in students now. Nevertheless, I think that still influenced me.

Most embarrassing belief?

That feminism had achieved its goals. I thought that was true given how I was raised. It took grad school to knock some sense into me.

How did grad school do that?

The penny dropped for me in a class on feminist philosophy with Lynne Tirrell. In particular, I remember a section of the course on “rape culture”, which isn’t a phrase you hear much anymore. At the time it was mind-blowing for me to make the connection between women’s oppression and the fact that all the women I knew were constantly thinking about how to avoid sexual assault. My mom had a supporting role here too. The Montreal massacre happened just before I went to grad school – this was a mass shooting (very rare in Canada) of 14 women at the École Polytechnique de Montréal. I remember my mom (a committed feminist) asking me what I thought about it and my response, which was something about how random the whole thing was. “Was it random?” she asked me. At the time I had no idea what she was on about and in Lynne’s class I had a real “ah ha!” moment.

When did you decide to go to grad school? Did you consider doing anything other than philosophy? Where did you want to go and why?

I was a double major in philosophy and environmental studies, so I thought I might do something in environmental policy or non-profit work. But Doug suggested grad school and I thought: why not? When I was an undergrad, at least at U of T, students weren't so aware of everything as they are now. There was no website you could go to to look up grad programs, so you had to go by word of mouth and preconceptions. In retrospect, I really had no idea what I was doing.

Was grad school what you expected?

I can't remember what I expected! I had done a lot of ancient philosophy as an undergrad and I really liked that approach to philosophy -- philosophy as a way of life. That way of thinking about philosophy wasn't quite the thing at Chapel Hill, though I did remain interested in ethics.

Philosophically, what was trending in your department, and in general? Favorite classes/teachers?

I recall that metaethics was big -- the realism/anti-realism debate, Geoff Sayre McCord had published Essays in Moral Realism a couple of years before I got there. Michael Smith visited a lot, which was always fun -- he was a great teacher. My favorite classes were my advisor Tom Hill's ethics classes. He had a way of being unimpressed with quick and superficial moves in philosophy that warms my heart when I think about it. He also is just such a deep thinker; I learned so much from him -- in particular that nothing in ethics is quick or simple.

What was the dissertation on? Who was your dissertation advisor? Was grad school, or writing the dissertation, challenging?

My dissertation was called Deliberation about the Good: Justifying What We Value. The title pretty much tells you the topic, because I'm not very creative about titles. I worked with Tom Hill, but I wasn't a Kantian; my approach was (and still is) much more Humean. Simon Blackburn was on my committee and was also a big influence. In retrospect, it was a good thing to have to make my arguments compelling to the Kantian and the Humean -- but it was also challenging. And writing was much more challenging then than it is now. I was fortunate to have a Mellon fellowship, which meant that I didn't have to teach the year I was finishing it, but I developed a serious Minesweeper addiction. When I couldn't write, I'd play Minesweeper until my hand cramped up. Eventually Minesweeper gave way to Tetris. I'm better now.

Describe Blackburn!

He does a great Scottish accent when he’s imitating David Hume. His comments on papers were often limited to check marks. He was fun to talk to and generous with ideas. After grad school, at a conference in Ireland, he introduced me to a drink called a velvet glove: Guinness and champagne. After that pub experience I think I gave the worst, most hungover talk of my career. I have since forgiven him for that.

Advice for graduate students? Were you encouraged to publish?

We were not encouraged to publish in the 90s. That's a real change. The job market wasn't great back then in the olden days, but it's even worse now. I wish I had good advice about how to position yourself on the job market. But all I can think of is that you should not take what happens personally -- there are just too many people on the market and so very qualified, deserving people do not get jobs.

What were your fellow grad students like? Who did you hang out with and what did you do to unwind? What was Chapel Hill like?

I was in a class of 13 people, including 5 women. I think the average class size at the time was 5 or 6. They referred to us as the elephant making its way through the cobra. (A Little Prince reference I guess) The other grad students at Chapel Hill were wonderful -- I married one of them and many of them are still among my best friends. I loved the grad student community at UNC. Chapel Hill was a lovely college town, but very different from the city where I grew up. The accent was weird, all the smiling and friendliness from strangers was very weird, the heat was weird, the plants were weird. But I think I adjusted to it pretty well. I remember that my black leather boots turned green from mold in the closet before it got cold enough to wear them. I remember being shocked that magnolias were so green all year round.

What does your spouse do nowadays? What is it like to be married to a person with a philosophical background? What are your deepest philosophical disagreements about?

My husband left philosophy, which has been very good for him. He does educational research now, focusing on DEI issues in STEM in higher education. He’s still grateful for his philosophy background; he likes to say that the most important thing he learned is to tell that this is not the same as that. Apparently not everyone can do that! Non-academics have often said to us that we must have the most amazing conversations, since we both have Ph.D.s in philosophy. We typically remember this remark when we're deeply engaged in a conversation about something ridiculous. Recently we had a heated debate about the true meaning of the phrase "I resemble that remark". Perhaps it's because Walker is now more of a social scientist than a philosopher, he got fed up with it before I did. Our deepest philosophical disagreement is probably about metaethics. I have always found expressivism very compelling. He is definitely a reductive naturalist. He likes to joke that I'm a moral relativist, which used to provoke a lecture on what expressivism actually entails. But after 32 years together we just cut straight to laughing about it and skip the lecture.

Struggles in grad school?

I struggled with imposter syndrome throughout graduate school and I know I wasn't alone in that.  Tom Hill helped a lot! I think I could have learned so much better if I hadn't been distracted by worrying that I wasn't smart enough. In retrospect, that was a terrific waste of time.

What did you want from the job market?

When I was on the market, I claimed to really want a job at a small liberal arts college. They looked so charming in the movies! I got my dream job at Franklin & Marshall College and it turned out that I didn't know anything about what a liberal arts college was like. I had moved from a university of 80,000 students to a university of 40,000 (or so -- I don't know the exact numbers, but both places were huge). What did I know about small colleges? Even my high school was bigger than F&M. The college and my colleagues were terrific, but I couldn't adjust to the expectations of the students. I needed more boundaries. After a year, I came to the University of Minnesota where there are plenty of boundaries -- not only is it another huge place, but Minnesotans are culturally more like Canadians.

What do you mean by boundaries?

In my early days of teaching, and especially at F&M, students wanted me to be their counsellor or big sister or something. I just wanted to teach them philosophy. There's a reason I didn't have children!

How is teaching as a grad student different from teaching as a professor?

As a young professor I was concerned with not looking like a student. I bought silk blouses and dress pants! Possibly I even wore heels, though I don’t quite remember. My sartorial standards have shifted considerably. And by “shifted” I mean “lowered”.

Ha! How has your teaching evolved?

I used to think it was my moral obligation to talk students out of their knee-jerk moral subjectivism. I don't think that anymore, thank goodness. I no longer try to talk students into or out of anything, except accepting fallacious arguments.

Love it. How have the students changed since you started?

The students I had at UNC in grad school were quite different from the students at Minnesota, but I think that may have more to do with place than time. In my first ethics class with full responsibility, I had a student say in class that evolution was ridiculous. Coming from Toronto, I was flabbergasted. I thought he was joking! I also had students there tell me that they didn't think they ought to be asking philosophical questions about religion, because it was against God's wishes. I haven't seen anything like that in Minnesota.

Tell me three or four things you have done since grad school that you are proud of, and explain why!

I'm proud of my new book, What Do You Want Out of Life?: A Philosophical Guide to Figuring Out What Matters. I think I finally succeeded in writing something that appeals to a broader audience than other academics. It was really fun to write, but also difficult. I kept missing the mark and starting over. I'm proud of the work I did as department chair to encourage my department to value diversity in philosophy. I have some amazing new colleagues in part as a result of the strategic planning I helped to do. Relatedly, I’m proud of my Central Division APA Presidential Address which was about making philosophy more inclusive and which involved me in some actual data gathering! That seems like enough to be proud of even though you asked for 3 or 4 things. Canadians and Minnesotans are averse to self-promotion!

What do you mean by diversity? What did your department do on the diversity front?

The conversations we had as a department led us to think of diversity broadly so that it includes representational diversity and also philosophical diversity – difference philosophical approaches and standards. (Philosophical diversity, to me, requires not asking “Why is this philosophy?”) We have hired a number of philosophers who are not white men, but there’s only so much progress you can make through hiring given the limited resources at a public university. We’ve tried to take DEI goals seriously in all of our endeavors from graduate recruitment to colloquium speaker invitations to undergraduate pedagogy.

You’ve done a lot of work on well-being. What is a good life?

I think we can evaluate lives in different ways: there are morally good lives (I haven't figured out much about that) and prudentially good lives (lives that are good for us). Maybe there are also aesthetically good lives. I work on well-being and the prudential good and within that area, I tend toward a kind of subjectivism according to which what's good for your own sake is determined by features of you. The theory I like is the Value Fulfillment Theory of well-being, which says that your life goes well (prudentially) when you fulfill or live up to your psychologically fitting values over time.

If I have figured out anything, it's that you don't figure it out completely as you get older. Things keep changing, shit keeps hitting the fan, and you have to keep shifting how you think about what matters to you. You'll prioritize different things at different stages of life, and you need to learn to reinterpret what success or fulfillment means as you and your circumstances change.

Can we just do psychology to figure out what makes life good?

Psychological research on well-being tends to come to the public in the form of steps to take to make you happier, where "happy" means satisfied with your life, or full of positive affect. I have learned a lot from this research about how to be happy in this sense! But happiness isn't the only thing I value.

So, can I make my life good by simply altering my values, making them easy to fulfill or live up to? Like we can make ourselves different people, potentially. How should we go about choosing who to be?

There is a place for altering your values and making them easier to fulfill, but lowering your standards to the ground doesn’t work for most people. I’m impressed with how sticky our psychology is – you can change your traits, but not that much; you can change your ambitions, but you probably can’t make yourself have none; you can reduce your desire for novelty and excitement, but you can’t eliminate it entirely. There’s no one-stop answer to how to go about choosing who to be. You have to think about what you’ve got to work with and figure it out.

Are there any aspects of your theory that concern you?

Yes.

Ha! But seriously…what do you worry about, theoretically?

To judge by other people’s worries, I ought to be worried about the fact that an immoral person could live well on my view. I’m not too worried about this for two reasons. First, I think most of us, given our social natures and given the fact that the value fulfillment theory isn’t a mental state theory, can’t actually live well without being morally decent. And second, prudential evaluations and moral evaluations are different. The thing I do worry about is the focus on goals (values are a special subset of goals, on my view). I’ve been reading some Buddhist philosophy lately and I sometimes wonder if I would be better off not thinking of life in terms of goals at all. That said, I think it makes sense to say that being less focused on goals is itself a good goal to have. Which is to say that, ultimately, I don’t think we can get away from goals.

In your estimation, do your idiosyncratic life experiences influence your philosophical perspectives? Do your experiences give you unique insight into the nature of well-being, for instance?

I’m sure that my personality influences my philosophical perspective. I’m an incredibly goal oriented person and I’m defending a view of well-being according to which it is essentially all about meeting goals.

Which philosopher’s ideas have most profoundly influenced your choices, your life?

I do love Hume. I had a quote from Hume read at my wedding!

What was the quote?

“Let all the powers and elements of nature conspire to serve and obey one man: Let the sun rise and set at his command: The sea and rivers roll as he pleases, and the earth furnish spontaneously whatever may be useful or agreeable to him: He will still be miserable, till you give him some one person at least, with whom he may share his happiness, and whose esteem and friendship he may enjoy”. (Treatise, Bk. II, Pt II, section V)

It’s in the section on our esteem for the rich and powerful, and he wasn’t thinking of marriage. But it has that characteristic Humean eloquence. And it’s a good thought!

Any interesting projects on the horizon?

I’m creating a new course for undergraduate students in the fall called “What do you want out of life, and what should you?” Despite the title, it’s not a course about my book (thank goodness) – it’s a course in which we’ll examine philosophical and psychological research on the ingredients of a good life: money, friendship, being in nature, flow, and so on. The idea is to ask what we should want in life and what the experts tell us about that. It’s going to be a hands-on kind of course in which we’ll have to put the research to work in our lives.

What role does philosophy play in the world in the future?

I like to think that philosophy will survive the AI revolution. Even if ChatGPT can write a philosophy essay, we will still need to ask philosophical questions about what that means, whether we ought to let it, and so on. I think philosophy will always be important, as long as it doesn’t close itself off in an ivory tower of irrelevance.

Will the problems of philosophy ever be solved?

I hope not.

Nowadays, what do you do to unwind?

I’m taking a tap dancing class! I’m terrible at it, but it’s so fun.

Favorite TV shows of all time?

I thought The Good Place was a great show, though it probably isn't my favorite of all time. I don't like listing favorites, because I have a terrible memory and so I can only ever think of the most recent things. So, thinking about the things I've watched recently: I thought Severance was philosophically interesting and great.

It is.

Slow Horses was really fun and features a fantastic performance by Gary Oldman as a farting, sarcastic drunk with a tiny soft spot deep inside; and (most recently) Cunk on Earth is making me laugh so hard my face hurts.

Cunk is perfect. Queen of the world, first move?

Queen of the world! What powers would I have? Queens often don't have much power, but since this is a hypothetical, I'm going to go for absolute power. The Leviathan Queen! Ursula K. LeGuin's novel The Lathe of Heaven taught me that it's harder to create utopia than you might think. It's about a guy who discovers that his dreams come true and then tries to use this power for good -- things go awry. I think the first thing I would do is consult some experts, maybe appoint them to an advisory committee. I'd also force them to do some active listening training and then I'd ask them for first steps on making the world a better place.

The idea of dying...I don't like it! Are you scared of death?

I'm highly averse to death. Hate it! But I wouldn't describe it as fear, because I don't think there's anything on the other side. I would just like to keep living, so I don't want to die, but I'm not afraid of ending up in the Bad Place.

Last meal?

I would want it to have very many courses, all paired with delicious wines. It would start with grilled oysters and end with ginger cheesecake. I’d leave the middle up to the chef to create some spectacular pescatarian meal that takes a really long time to eat.

[interviewer: Cliff Sosis]