Interview with Susan Haack
I’ve been interested in getting a female philosopher onto Freethought Blogs, someone who actively blogs the subject and is keen to join us as an atheist activist. The general reception to my idea has been “there aren’t any of those.” There are women who are philosophers (full on, with Ph.D.s and publications and the whole nine yards), but none who actively blog on philosophy and identify openly as atheists or even new atheists (meaning: willing to openly take on religion, fervently and without quarter).
By all means, if you know anyone like that, tell me about them at once. In the meantime, I decided I’d go exploring, starting by collecting interviews with my favorite women in philosophy today. So at least women in philosophy can have a voice here and you can learn about them and their work. Of course I’ll be asking if any of them might be interested in blogging with us, but I don’t expect that. But I am also asking them if they know any women who might fit our bill, especially up and coming women in philosophy who are opinionated and outspoken and don’t care who they piss off.
In the meantime, here is the first in the series, my interview with Susan Haack, one of my favorite epistemologists and philosophers of science. Currently a professor of philosophy and law at U. Miami, Dr. Haack is best known for such works as Evidence and Inquiry and Defending Science—Within Reason (for more see her official cv). I will be asking many of the same questions of others in future months. And in this case as in every, we don’t agree on everything, but we agree on a lot!
Interview with Susan Haack
R.C.: Why did you choose a career in philosophy?—and I don’t mean as a teacher, but as a philosopher, actually doing philosophy?
S.H: After mulling over this question for quite some time, I concluded that it’s impossible even to say when I became a philosopher, let alone why. I vaguely remember reading what must have been my first philosophy book, Richard Robinson’s An Atheist’s Values;[1] but I’m not sure that, at the time, I fully grasped that this was a philosophy book, and it didn’t leave a very strong impression. Anyway, when I went to Oxford to study politics, philosophy, and economics it was, initially, the “politics” part that most appealed to me. But somewhere down the line, despite encouragement from my politics tutor to pursue that subject, philosophy took over. I suspected, in some intuitive way, that political history, fascinating as I then found it, would eventually pall, but that philosophy would be of enduring interest. (I now think that, luckily, I was right on both scores.)
Page 1 of 14 | Next page