two years in
Jun. 3rd, 2016 11:30 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
aryanhwyYou know, every time I visit https://www.dur.ac.uk/philosophy/staff/ and see my name listed there, I am taken aback. I am surprised that this ever happened.
This is not, I think, a manifestation of imposter syndrome. I don't actually doubt my ability to be successful at what I do. It's not just my publication track record that shows this, but the fact that I understand the things I love well enough to talk about them to people who know nothing about them and have them go "Oh, that's really interesting!" (and mean it). A few months ago I posted a series of questions (without context) on FB, to pump people's intuitions about how 'while' works in English, both semantically and syntactically. I got a huge flood of responses (more than 50 people contributed), some from native English speakers, some from non-, some from logicians, some from philosophers, and most from people who were neither. Their responses were crucial for helping me figure out exactly how medieval views about the truth conditions of 'P while Q' differ from contemporary logical accounts of the connective. Yesterday I sent off the final version of the paper, which will be published in August, to the editors, and included in it is an enormous footnote thanking every single one of them. I then also shared the final paper with all of them, and it has been really gratifying how interested the non-academics are in reading it, even if they know they won't understand the logical symbols or the Latin, and also how interested they were in giving me their answers in the first place and getting to "do science" with me. This extended encounter is yet another reason why I am firmly of the "FB is NOT the devil" camp: In what other sort of context could I have so easily brought in to the research process a whole ton of non-specialists? How often do non-specialists get to participate in this sort of thing? Sure, there are things like medical trials, or the sorts of psychological experiments like the ones I sign Gwen up to do (she got to do TWO yesterday morning!), but these are all rather concrete and particular, rather than theoretical and abstract. I really, really love being able to share this side of thing with non-academics, and I think I do it well. So it's not imposter syndrome.
Ahem. I got a bit side-tracked. So why do I find it so strange to see my name in a list of academic staff in a philosophy department? It's because I never thought I'd play the game well enough, the game of "being a philosopher". I still have a very tenuous relationship with contemporary philosophy as a discipline, and I have to walk a very fine line to ensure that my deep ambivalence for a lot of things in contemporary philosophy doesn't show to my students. (Let's just say: I'm glad I won't be tutoring metaphysics next year.) My supervisees, on the other hand, do tend to see that side of me, and I think that's OK. I think my resistance to traditional approaches to philosophy, my common response of "but why should I care?", forces them to sharpen their ideas and be very explicit about what it is they are doing and why. (Not all final marks for 3rd year theses for this year have been settled yet, but on the whole I am amazingly proud of my students. They produced some really exceptional work. I've got my first meeting with next year's students this afternoon, and I am quite excited about the new crop.)
Because I don't really self-identify as a philosopher, I never actively did things to make myself more attractive as a full-time member of a philosophical faculty. I never taught undergraduate philosophy before fall 2014. I've never been to the APA (less important in Europe, but unheard of in the US). I basically conducted my affairs with the opposite of imposter syndrome -- namely, megalomania (and I've talked about that before; though I see now I used the term 'monomania', and I'm not sure which is appropriate. I think 'megalomania'), a type of hubris in which I went about doing what I wanted to do sure that one day my brilliance would be recognized. (Well, that's putting it a bit cheekily, but in a sense, that's what I did: I did what I wanted in the way that I wanted and did it well, and trusted that this would be all that I needed to get where I wanted to in life.)
If you've grown up with the American Dream, this doesn't seem like hubris, it seems like realism. But anyone who has been a part of contemporary academic philosophy knows that departments aren't just sitting there twiddling their thumbs until someone with merit comes along and then they say "Let's give that person a job"; it isn't like that at all. Competition is so fierce, there is so much one can do to improve their chances, and I did none of them.
So I look at that staff list, and I am surprised. By every narrative you're given of the discipline nowadays, I shouldn't be here. I sure am glad that I am.
This is not, I think, a manifestation of imposter syndrome. I don't actually doubt my ability to be successful at what I do. It's not just my publication track record that shows this, but the fact that I understand the things I love well enough to talk about them to people who know nothing about them and have them go "Oh, that's really interesting!" (and mean it). A few months ago I posted a series of questions (without context) on FB, to pump people's intuitions about how 'while' works in English, both semantically and syntactically. I got a huge flood of responses (more than 50 people contributed), some from native English speakers, some from non-, some from logicians, some from philosophers, and most from people who were neither. Their responses were crucial for helping me figure out exactly how medieval views about the truth conditions of 'P while Q' differ from contemporary logical accounts of the connective. Yesterday I sent off the final version of the paper, which will be published in August, to the editors, and included in it is an enormous footnote thanking every single one of them. I then also shared the final paper with all of them, and it has been really gratifying how interested the non-academics are in reading it, even if they know they won't understand the logical symbols or the Latin, and also how interested they were in giving me their answers in the first place and getting to "do science" with me. This extended encounter is yet another reason why I am firmly of the "FB is NOT the devil" camp: In what other sort of context could I have so easily brought in to the research process a whole ton of non-specialists? How often do non-specialists get to participate in this sort of thing? Sure, there are things like medical trials, or the sorts of psychological experiments like the ones I sign Gwen up to do (she got to do TWO yesterday morning!), but these are all rather concrete and particular, rather than theoretical and abstract. I really, really love being able to share this side of thing with non-academics, and I think I do it well. So it's not imposter syndrome.
Ahem. I got a bit side-tracked. So why do I find it so strange to see my name in a list of academic staff in a philosophy department? It's because I never thought I'd play the game well enough, the game of "being a philosopher". I still have a very tenuous relationship with contemporary philosophy as a discipline, and I have to walk a very fine line to ensure that my deep ambivalence for a lot of things in contemporary philosophy doesn't show to my students. (Let's just say: I'm glad I won't be tutoring metaphysics next year.) My supervisees, on the other hand, do tend to see that side of me, and I think that's OK. I think my resistance to traditional approaches to philosophy, my common response of "but why should I care?", forces them to sharpen their ideas and be very explicit about what it is they are doing and why. (Not all final marks for 3rd year theses for this year have been settled yet, but on the whole I am amazingly proud of my students. They produced some really exceptional work. I've got my first meeting with next year's students this afternoon, and I am quite excited about the new crop.)
Because I don't really self-identify as a philosopher, I never actively did things to make myself more attractive as a full-time member of a philosophical faculty. I never taught undergraduate philosophy before fall 2014. I've never been to the APA (less important in Europe, but unheard of in the US). I basically conducted my affairs with the opposite of imposter syndrome -- namely, megalomania (and I've talked about that before; though I see now I used the term 'monomania', and I'm not sure which is appropriate. I think 'megalomania'), a type of hubris in which I went about doing what I wanted to do sure that one day my brilliance would be recognized. (Well, that's putting it a bit cheekily, but in a sense, that's what I did: I did what I wanted in the way that I wanted and did it well, and trusted that this would be all that I needed to get where I wanted to in life.)
If you've grown up with the American Dream, this doesn't seem like hubris, it seems like realism. But anyone who has been a part of contemporary academic philosophy knows that departments aren't just sitting there twiddling their thumbs until someone with merit comes along and then they say "Let's give that person a job"; it isn't like that at all. Competition is so fierce, there is so much one can do to improve their chances, and I did none of them.
So I look at that staff list, and I am surprised. By every narrative you're given of the discipline nowadays, I shouldn't be here. I sure am glad that I am.
