Resolution Read, Week 7: Would Aquinas Baptise Aliens?

This week's Resolution Read is a bit of a cheat. It's a paper that's been sitting on my desktop for ages because it has a great title, but which was so far removed from anything I do that I knew I'd never get a Round Tuit. Which actually makes it the perfect paper for a Resolution Read, since the whole point of the not-a-resolution was to give me as many Tuits in whichever shape is most pleasing that I need to read papers like this. So why did I pick this paper this week, and why is it a bit of a cheat? Because I was recently shared a call for papers on Theological Explorations in Time and Space, and it occurred to me that if I read something about aliens, I might have something to say on the topic. So...maybe this will end up being research related? Who knows! That's the whole point of reading these things!

The paper in question is:

Edmund Michael Lazzari, "Would St. Thomas Aquinas Baptize an Extraterrestrial?" New Blackfriars 99, no. 1082 (2018): 440-457, DOI:10.1111/nbfr.12319.

Point The First I want to make: The idea of there being intelligent extraterrestrials is probably less unrealistic for Aquinas than it is for (some) modern people -- this is because Aquinas's ontology includes angels, which by definition are non-terrestrial intelligences who live in the heavens (at least, some of them do). Once you've got both humans and angels in your ontology, expanding it to include the possibility extra-terrestrial beings (like angels) who are rational (like humans) should be a no brainer.

Lazzari poses the initial question he considers thusly: "the question of fallen extraterrestrials who do not share the human nature assumed by Christ is an interesting and important one for contemporary theologians" (p. 440). Point The Second that I would like to make: Even if we're happy admitting extraterrestrials into our ontology, why would we think that they have to be fallen? For there are two options: One, Adam and Eve's transgression is not species-specific, but infects beyond the bounds of humanity. Two, Adam and Eve's transgression is species-specific, so the only way there could be fallen aliens is if they experienced their own fall. If the former option is the case, one might ask why their sin spreads to extraterrestrials but not to, say, animals. If the latter option is the case, then what is to prevent Christ from assuming their nature and providing them with the same act of salvation?

Anyway, onto the actual paper. In the first section, Lazzari establishes that, on Thomist metaphysics, if "intelligent extraterrestrial life forms" have "radically different matter than human beings", then they do not have human natures, because human nature is hylomorphic, and if you change the matter you no longer have the same nature, but that if they are in fact intelligent (able to receive intelligible universals), then this "is a guarantee of an immortal soul" (p. 445). So much for metaphysics.

In section two, Lazzari moves on to theology. Because theology, unlike metaphysics, relies so much on revelation, any theological conclusions we draw about aliens will be necessarily speculative (absent any divine revelation that specifically addresses aliens!) And here Lazzari addresses my concerns about fallen aliens, by pointing out two important things: First, if the aliens weren't fallen, it wouldn't make sense to talk about their soteriology, so there'd be no point in writing this paper. Second, if the aliens have fallen, there's no reason why they shouldn't have their own fall event (so, the two options I outlined above in fact should be three). Indeed, Lazzari argues that according to Aquinas, it is not possible that the fallen of humanity could have caused the aliens to fall too:

Any fall of extraterrestrial life could not be caused by human beings in the theology of St. Thomas Aquinas. While other theologians in the Christian tradition have a strong belief in the fall of human beings introducing disharmony into the cosmos, St. Thomas holds that the natures of other animals were not changed by the fall...Therefore, it is not the case that the fall of extraterrestrial life can be included under the same fault as the fall of humanity (p. 447).

So, if the aliens had their own fall event, Lazzari says this could've happened in two ways: It could be that Alien Adam and Alien Eve fell just as Human Adam and Human Eve did. Or, it could be that Alien Adam and Alien Eve metaphorically eschewed the apple, and it was one of their descendants that fell. In this latter case, "it would be possible for some of the species to be in need of salvation and some to still have that right relationship with God" (p. 448).

From this conclusion, Lazzari moves on to Section III, in which he argues that since humanity's fall cannot have caused the alien's fall, humanity's salvation cannot be the alien's salvation. This is because the redemptive act for humanity involved Jesus taking on human nature, not alien nature. However, while "it was fitting that the Incarnation occur because human nature was in need of salvation and it is by the Incarnation that humanity is saved...it could have happened another way" (pp. 448-449). This leaves open the possibility that some other redemptive act -- whether Incarnation or not -- is available to redeem the aliens.

Given this, I find it strange that Lazzari's conclusion in this section is that "Since baptism is the remedy of original sin for human beings, it seems as though one must have a human nature to undergo baptism" (p. 451). It is not clear why baptism couldn't be a part of the remedy of original sin in other beings as well. While it is true that if one is a human being, then one must be baptised in order to be saved, it doesn't follow that if one is baptised (in order to be saved), one must be a human being.

Lazzari opens section 4 with:

The sacrificial life of Jesus Christ redeemed those who have a human nature and are incorporated into His sacrifice by baptism. Because of the crucial role that assumption of a human nature plays in Chalcedonian and Thomistic soteriology, it is not possible to simply transfer the effects of the life of Jesus Christ to other intelligent beings who are not sharers in human nature" (p. 451).

The question I immediately have is: Why must Jesus have only one sacrificial life? What is to prevent him from becoming Incarnate as human, to save humanity, and then later (or earlier!) becoming Incarnate as alien, to same alienity? We don't need to be able to transfer "the effects of the life of Jesus Christ" to other natures, if there is nothing to prevent him from having had another life, with another nature. And since he is, you know, God, and omnipotent, and there doesn't seem to be anything self-contradictory in his being incarnated more than once, I don't see why this isn't an option for Lazzari (and for Jesus).

Well, Lazzari considers this in his survey of options offered by other authors: "The second is that there would be an Incarnation for every intelligent species which fell from grace" (p. 451). Lazzari's rejection of this position appears to be on the basis that it is one that is held by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who also argued for the "(heretical concept of) the inevitable and universal domain of sin" (p. 453). But I don't see that there being an Incarnation for every species that fell from grace entails that every species fell or will fall from grace -- so just because Teilhard de Chardin maintains one heretical view it doesn't follow that all his views are heretical. It appears that the other objection one would have to the one-incarnation-per-distinct-fall response is that (quoting Teilhard), it would "still [be] the same sacrifice, at all times and in all places" (p. 453) -- i.e., that Jesus's sacrifice as a man would be essentially the same as his sacrifice as an alien. But that presupposes that the essential distinction of human nature from alien nature is not enough to differentiate the sacrifices -- for indeed, the human sacrifice saves humanity, while the alien sacrifice saves alienity. How on earth can these then be "the same sacrifice", if they involve distinct natures and have distinct consequences?

As far as I can tell, Lazzari doesn't give us a reason to reject the one-incarnation-per-distinct-fall position, he merely argues that such a position is not necessary ("for there is nothing preventing God from simply forgiving without satisfaction" p. 456), and further calls it "highly unfitting" because "the Incarnation is such an important and pivotal event in the universe that it would not be fitting for such an event to be repeated" (p. 455). (Why can't one argue the contrary: It is such an important enough, it should be maximally repeated, to infinity!?)

But these concerns are to some extent beside the point. The question was, would Aquinas baptise aliens? It appears that in the absence of evidence that aliens shared in our human nature or that Jesus was also incarnated with an alien nature, the answer is "No, he wouldn't." Baptism is specifically tied to the rehabilitation of fallen human natures via a redemptive act that involved Jesus taking on such a human nature. Without the relevant redemptive act or participation in the relevant nature, baptism would be irrelevant for an alien.

A final comment on the paper: It was very weird to read a paper in New Franciscan that discusses Aquinas and doesn't have a single quote in Latin. (References are given to Latin texts, but no actual quotes.)

Edited to add: When I said "New Franciscan" I mean "New Blackfriars". I can never remember what color which order wears...

Resolution Read, Week 6: Early Modern Women Philosophers

Whoever would've thought it'd be so hard to read one item of my own choice (rather than dictated by deadlines or teaching) per week? Uh, well, me, which is why this was not-a-resolution.

However, at the end of another busy week I had 30 minutes to spare, so I picked up something I'd downloaded a few days earlier:

Eileen O'Neill, "Early Modern Women Philosophers and the History of Philosophy", Hypatia 20, no. 3 (Summer, 2005): pp. 185-197

Why did I download this? Because Wednesday I needed to suggest some potential referees for a paper on a 19th C woman philosopher, and went to google. What I found was interesting: In the context of people who are interested in rehabilitating the history of women in philosophy, a disproportionate amount of time is spent on the 17th and 18th century. I found almost nothing that focused on the 19th century. (This gives me some hope that the paper I submitted on Tuesday will find a niche to fill -- but also makes me sad that it'll be basically impossible to find any other philosopher who has written on this particular woman before.)

Why focus on women philosophers in the 17th and 18th century? Well, certainly one benefit is that this is a period in which women were increasingly writing more and more, and writing more and more in readable vernaculars. (I mean, no one disputes that medieval women philosophers and mystics were also writing in the vernacular, but more people probably know medieval Latin than Middle English, Middle French, or Old German. And compared to any of these languages, Early Modern English and Early Modern/Modern French are much more accessible.) Another reason people focus on these women is, as O'Neill notes, that their importance is demonstrated "by the numerous editions and translation of their texts that continued to appear into the nineteenth century" (p. 186). Not only that, but there were large numbers of men philosophers who wrote on these 17th- and 18th-century women in the 19th century, thus further contributing to them being a part of a longer conversation.

One wonders, therefore, where the 19th-century women fit into this. Were the men reading and commentating on women of the previous centuries alone, or were they in dialogue with women as well? And where are the 20th-century men discussing the works of 19th-century women? For the former question, O'Neill gestures towards a negative answer: "by the nineteenth century, much of the published material by women once deemed philosophical no longer seemed so" (p. 186). This idea that what women were doing in this period is not philosophy appears to be reinforced in Mary Warnock's choice of whom to include in her anthology of 17th-21st C women philosophers, based on an underlying conception of what philosophy is that O'Neill criticises on pp. 191-192.

The gap in the market for discussions of 19th-century women philosophers is noted by O'Neill in her paper: when

in the mid-1990s a publishing company decided to produce a supplement for one of its reference works on philosophy...a feminist philosopher who was on the editorial board had encouraged the press to include in the supplement a number of entries on women philosophers...It was never explained to me...no women philosophers from the nineteenth century were included (p. 190)

Hopefully, things have improved in the last 15 years, and this gap no longer exists.

In the end, why did I read a paper on early modern women philosophers, when the woman philosopher I was interested in lived at the end of the 19th/beginning of the 20th century? In part because there is no such corresponding paper for that period, and reading O'Neill's paper gave me space for interesting reflections as to why.

Resolution Read Week 3

This week's read is:

Mark Erickson, Paul Hanna, & Carl Walker, (2020), "The UK higher education senior management survey: a statactivist response to managerialist governance", Studies in Higher Education; preprint here.

It's dire.

Following in the footsteps of UK Higher Education's desire to put metrics on everything, the authors produced and ran the first "Senior Management Survey" (SMS), "investigating satisfaction with senior managers and university governance" (p. 1). Over 5000 academics responded (I have a suspicion, unconfirmed, that I was one of them; I seem to remember taking such a survey at the time the authors say they were gathering data), with the primary result being that the mean satisfaction score across all universities that had at least 25 responses (78 universities in total) was 10.54%.

10.54%.

Dire.

Of course the first thing I did, when the reference came across twitter, was search to see where my own university falls. I was rather shocked to find it was no. 3 on the table, but less shocked when I saw that the highest satisfaction score of any surveyed university was 36.60%. That's still pretty dire.

The authors quote, anonymously, one free-text response to their survey:

We hold students accountable (through marking and attendance monitoring), students hold us accountable (through teaching evaluations and NSS), senior management holds us accountable. Why do we not get to evaluate senior management in the same way students get to evaluate us, and why can’t these necessary metrics carry at least some weight? (p. 8)

This I think hits the nail directly on the head, and is reflective of the problematic balance of power that UK HEs currently have to deal with. There is little, if any, recourse (beyond union activism) that academics have to the increasing erosion of their working conditions through systemic mismanagement.

A few things stood out to me, reading this paper:

Firstly, "academics are estimated to be one of the most surveilled groups in history" (p. 3). Working in academia, you tend to get inured to the constant measurement that is done. Of your research quality, of your student satisfaction (which is NOT teaching quality!), of your intrinsic value as a person (I jest...or do I). But this statement made me pause for a moment and reflect on the fact that I can't think of any such metrics that my partner, a computer scientist in industry, is subjected to. It also made me remember this FB post I posted last year. Why are we so closely surveyed? Why are other industries not?

Secondly, the authors did not pull any punches when they came to describing general HE management structures in the UK: "Senior management teams now appoint self-selecting and self-reproducing boards of governors that allow them to exercise largely unlimited powers that are endorsed by governing boards, usually after faux exercises in consultation (Holmwood et al. 2016)" (p. 4). It's hard not to read that and feel a sense of recognition: I know I've been involved in too many "faux exercises in consultation".

Thirdly, "the [SMS] survey sought to move the gaze from the narrow metrics of staff performance to the senior management teams who set the conditions through which staff performance becomes possible" (p. 7). Yeah. We're always being told how important it is to contextualise things, and yet there seems to be very little desire to contextualise the metrics that academics are measured by via the conditions which they must work in.

Finally, in the subsection "Work as a mental health hazard", a few quotes struck quite a chord with me, including: "my anxiety levels have reached critical to the extent that I literally find it hard to breathe. I often wake in the early hours and can’t go back to sleep because of having to make notes about things I’ve forgotten to do at work" (p. 13) and "characteristics of generalised anxiety disorder (e.g. struggling to sleep and breathe)" (p. 13). These resonated with me at a very personal level, because this describes my own experiences of the last year or two precisely, and I would not have known, otherwise, that something as simple as waking up at 3am with a huge jolt of adrenaline as your brain starts going over all the things you didn't do the day before (or the day before that or the day before that or the day before that) and all the things you need to do the next day (and the day after that and the day after that and the day after that) and that you can't shut down for at least an hour or so in order to fall back asleep (no wonder I am constantly exhausted, it's not just because I have a busy life with a partner and a kid and outside hobbies, etc.) rises to the level of problematic anxiety. I think I'm going to make an appointment with my GP to discuss this further.

Reading the article, it was hard not to recognise a lot of my own experiences within it. On the other hand, I couldn't help but think how easy it would be for the very people that should be reading it with horror and changing their practices as a result to simply disregard the content of the paper as sour grapes. And therein lies one of the biggest problems UK HE faces: The power dynamics are such that although "academics cannot wait for university leaders to rise to a challenge they do not recognise" (p. 5) it's not clear what power we have to do anything to address this challenge.

I hope the authors continue to circulate the SMS (maybe on a yearly basis?) and publish follow-up results. It would be interesting to see what longer term trends can be seen.

Resolution Read Week 2

My first paper for my New Year's not a resolution is:

Wang, Hao. 1957. "The Axiomatization of Arithmetic", Journal of Symbolic Logic 22, no. 2: 145-158.

This was recommended to me as a recommendation for one of my students, but it's a topic I'm also interested in, especially as we're heading into the term where I teach PA! Maybe I can fill in a bit more history, this year.

The paper addresses a question that I've asked myself, and my own students have asked me, namely: Where do the axioms come from? This isn't just an abstract question, but a historical/conceptual one. Once you have an axiom set it's easy (well...) to see that they are the right ones; but how do you discover the axioms in the first place? Wang identifies one option:

• You start from typical proofs and results, and work backwards to determine what the underlying assumptions are.

Another option would be to pick some reasonable assumptions, and adopt them until they are shown to be inconsistent. A third would be to prove what you can, and when you get stuck, add what you need as an axiom.

The focus of Wang's paper is Peano's axiomatization of arithmetic, which is not wholly Peano's but is in fact a borrowing from Dedekind and Grassmann (p. 145). All three were, however, rooted in a desire to make "an explicit statement of some adequate group of natural rules and conventions which enables us to justify all the true numerical formulae containing 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, +, *, =, (, )" (p. 146)" (note the lack of exponentiation). Wang describes Grassmann's Lehrbuch der Arithmetik (1861) as "the first serious and rather successful attempt to put numbers on a more or less axiomatic basis" (p. 147); his scope covered not only the non-negative integers but also the negative ones. Wang gives Grassmann's axiomatization (which he calls L_2), and notes that from it, the system L_1 (which consists in the commutativity and associativity of + and *, the distribution of * over +, the fact that 0 is the identity for + and 1 for *, that a+(-a)=0, that if c is non-zero and ca=cb, then a=b, that sums and products of positive numbers are positive numbers, that every number is either positive, not positive, or 0, and a version of mathematical induction) can be derived. (L_1 is described as the contemporary -- i.e., in the 1950s -- characterisation of the integers in abstract algebra).

Wang points out a drawback of Grassmann's L_2, which is that it does not require distinct integers to have distinct successors, and hence L_2 has models consisting in only a single object (p. 149). This was made explicit in Peano, whose system contained the basic concepts of 1, number, and successor, and five axioms:

1. 1 is a number
2. The successor of any number is a number
3. No two numbers have the same successor
4. 1 is not the successor of any number
5. Any property which belongs to 1, and also to the successor of every number which has the property, belongs to all numbers

(Nowadays, presentations of PA often start from 0, as opposed to 1; in this, Frege's account of numbers differs from Dedekind's in that Frege did begin with 0.) These axioms were taken from Dedekind's essay Was sind und was sollen die Zahlen? (1888) (p. 149), and Dedekind's source for these axioms is preserved in a two-page letter that Wang quotes (in translation) (pp. 150-151). What's important is that these are an axiomatisation of the concept of number only -- there's nothing here to cover the arithmetic operations. These (addition, multiplication, and exponentiation) Dedekind defines later in the essay.

Sadly, since Wang's interest is in how Dedekind got to the axioms, and not what the axioms were, he does not discuss the axioms for the arithmetic operations, which leaves me with two questions:

1. How do you define the arithmetic operations if you're starting from 1 rather than from 0?
2. Is Dedekind 1888 translated into English so I can read it and find out the answer to the previous questions myself?

Not a New Year's Resolution

As I was lying in bed last night (thanks, jetlag, for three hours only half-asleep during the middle of the night), I realised that while I've gotten into a good writing habit (first via my resolution of 2014 and later on via the Any Good Thing monthy writing challenge plus tracking my words at wordkeeperalpha.com), and am making a conscious effort to keep my email under control, the thing I feel like I never have time to do any more, or that I feel guilty about doing because there's always something better/more important I should be doing instead, is read journal articles just for the sake of reading about something that interests me and may one day be relevant (or may not be) -- to be distinguished from seeking out articles and reading them specifically because I'm writing a paper about the topic right this very moment.

So my not-resolution for 2020 is that I'm going to read one journal article a week, excepting weeks I'm on holiday, or probably also during marking season in May/June, and then blog about it briefly here, hopefully every Friday. Then it will be a Thing To Be Done rather than a Thing To Do, and hopefully I can get it done guilt-free!

Wot I Read in 2019

In an attempt to track my reading in 2019, I created this post in early January to note down every book that I finished in 2019 (I say "finished" because there were two that I was reading at the turn of the year, which I wanted to count; but this also doesn't count books I started but didn't finish before the end of the year). We'll see how long this lasts. [Edit Dec 31: I did it! It lasted all year!]

Fiction

1. Acks, Alex, Wireless and More Steam-Powered Adventures (finished July 11, 2019): I reviewed this book on SFFReviews.
2. Atwood, Margaret, Hag-Seed (finished April 3, 2019): I picked this up from the airport the week before; I'd read some good buzz about it when it first came out, and it had gone on my mental to-read list then. It was good, but it also felt very...self-indulgent, I think is the best way to characterise it. It's a book that an established writer gets to write, not a book that could be a debut. It was as if the entire book was a Mary Sue, even if all of the characters in it had their foibles. Nevertheless, it was hard to put down.
3. B.B., The Little Grey Men (finished October 6, 2019): Recommendation from WorldCon. What a strange little book. It was immensely descriptive, being suffused throughout with a deep intimate knowledge of nature. This is probably a plus in many people's books, but there was just so much description, which made it hard going for me. I loved the three gnomes, though, and their distinctive characters, and found the grim, dark way that death was treated to be both rather harsh and comfortingly ordinary. I'm not sure I'd call it a kids book, but I might try reading it to G in a few years. (Not now. There is too much vocabulary in it that she doesn't know, I'd be interrupted every few words to define them!)
4. Benaway, Gwen, ed., Mother, Maiden, Crone (finished December 30, 2019): I picked this up at Portal Bookshop in York last month. It's a collection of fantasy stories all written by trans women and trans feminine people. I reviewed it for SFFReviews, but the review won't be up until February.
5. Brennan, Sarah Rees, Unspoken (finished January 6, 2019): I can't remember now where this book was recommended to me, and I'll admit my first reaction on looking at the cover when my copy arrived was "erm...." And while it was a bit Twilight-stalkery, it didn't involve vampires, it made me laugh a lot, it filled me with teenage angst (yes, this can be a good thing), and I'm a sucker for a gothic romance, whether it's 19th C or 21st C. Looking forward to reading the sequel.
6. Brennan, Sarah Rees, Untold (finished January 29, 2019): Alas, this one didn't live up to the standard set by the first one. Not enough Gothicness, not too many, too complicated love triangles, weirdly awkward not-quite-sex, and enough little details that didn't add up or showed the author isn't British... -- the idea that someone in Britain would threaten someone else by saying "I'll get a gun and shoot you"; the idea that everyone tourist goes to a post office; calling university "college". I'm glad I got this one from the library rather than buying a copy.
7. Burgis, Stephanie, Kat Incorrigible (finished September 26, 2019): A WorldCon recommendation. Fun, but unlike some middle grade books that are great for adults, this one felt more like it was merely okay for adults.
8. Carey, Jacqueline, Kushiel's Dart (finished September 8, 2019): A friend lent this (and the next two) to me after it came up on an FB conversation. The book did not sit well with me in its opening chapters, but the worries that I had in them were actually quite strongly assuaged as the book went on, and I came away from it thinking it was quite superlative, extremely well constructed, with great world-building, entrancing characters, and a complex but believable plot. I just wish Carey would've addressed the issue of birth control.
9. Carey, Jacqueline, Kushiel's Chosen (finished September 13, 2019): This was a very good second book. It very nearly stood on its own feet, and much of what I loved about the previous one was maintained in this one. If I have one complaint, it's that the first one seemed...bigger. The way in which backstory was introduced in the first book was more seamless and better integrated -- little side bits and details were mentioned long before their import was ever highlighted. In this book, though, new cultures sprung onto the page fully-fledged as soon as they were needed. The result was something that was just as fun and well-crafted, but not as realistic.
10. Carey, Jacqueline, Kushiel's Avatar (finished September 23, 2019): The minor complaints I had about book 2 did not surface at all in book 3. Book 3 actually reminded me a lot of book 1, in terms of the plot cycle, but everything was bigger, wider, and deeper. It lacked some of the erotic elements that the first two books did, but it also felt like that ws a natural progression, too. I was quite impressed.
11. Carlisle, Karen J., Department of Curiosities (finished June 5, 2019): I've been anticipating reading this book ever since Karen first started blogging about her nascent ideas for it years ago. It was a long time coming, but as soon as it arrived I quit reading the book I had been reading to start this. I really enjoyed it; it was a sophisticated story with believable steampunk elements, and the heroine, Tilly, was the right balance of proper and improper. She's not afraid to hike up her skirts -- or rip them off entirely! -- and get her hands dirty, but she also is distractingly interested in her clothing -- I'm not sure I've ever read a book that used the word "bustle" quite so often! At first I was a bit disappointed, because I thought the book was going to be set in Australia rather than England, but I was pleased at the end when Tilly ended up in Oz.
12. Cho, Zen, Sorcerer to the Crown (finished December 1, 2019): This was a WorldCon rec; a couple people whom I know in person suggested it, and I also attended a panel that Cho was on and really liked her. The book is basically "Austen with dragons and magic and people of color", which is a premise I find hard to fault. The book was...good. I enjoyed it. It was fun. It had all the right early-19th C feel, and it didn't get the names seriously wrong, so that's a plus in its favor. It wasn't outstanding, but it was good enough I'll probably eventually get the sequel.
13. Córdova, Zoraida, Labyrinth Lost (finished December 18, 2019): This was another WorldCon rec. It was...okay. I'm coming to realise that urban/modern fantasy isn't really my thing, and I found the plot both a bit linear and a bit predictable and the writing was at times ponderous and too full of exposition. I'll probably read the sequel if I can get it from the library, but I'm not sure I'd purchase it.
14. Coulthurst, Audrey, Of Fire and Stars (finished June 23, 2019): This book was an exercise in how not to write. I wanted to like it -- it had a solid premise, and I definitely want to see more lesbian NA fantasy -- but it was just...not good. The politics felt superficial and unrealistic, most of the main characters who were not the two female leads seemed to exist solely as foils to put up barriers between the MCs, I never got any sense of realism or urgency, and while you knew from the start that the two female leads were going to end up together, there was never any scope in there for any other strong relationships, whether romantic, platonic, or other (except for ONE, but one of the two involved died before the end of the book). It just didn't work for me.
15. Epps, E. M., You Made My Heart a Hunter (finished January 8, 2019): Lhennuen is the logician-trying-to-be-human heroine that I have always wanted.
16. Epps, E. M., The Interpreter's Tale (finished February 12, 2019): Having enjoyed the previous novella so much, I wanted to read something else by Epps, and its description intrigued me. I was delighted to find out it was set in the same universe as YMMHaH, and even briefly mentioned Lhennuen. But the focus of the story was Eliadmaru, the titular interpreter, and a royal assignment he was given. I loved how the story upset conventions: A plot point that I was sure would go badly ended up happily and sweetly, with no drama, whereas another plot point that should have been some sort of happily ever after went south in an unexpected way. So reading it was full of peaks and valleys, and now I'd like to read even more by Epps.
17. Fennell, Jack, ed., A Brilliant Void (finished January 31, 2019): I started this in 2018, but finished it in 2019. It's a collection of early Irish short science fiction, and I reviewed it at SFFReviews.
18. Fellman, Isaac (published under the name Rachel Fellman), The Breath of the Sun (finished August 25, 2019): Personal recommendation from a friend on twitter. The back blurb described the MC as someone who deals in paradoxes, which got me all excited, until I started reading and realised the description was rather metaphorical. But even without actual paradoxes, this book was very good. It was deep and intimate, and cold and quiet, and I had to read it slowly (I also read a lot of it while at WorldCon, tucked into a little cubicle bed in a hostel after long days of peopling, which I'm sure enhanced the slightly otherworldly feel of the experience of reading it). It wasn't sparkling and brilliant in the way that some of the books I read this year were, but I think it's among one of the best.
19. Fforde, Katie, A Country Escape (finished March 15, 2019): I had a long layover at LHR, so I bought this book; I started it around 1:30pm and finished it around 8:00pm, which was a satisfying experience. The book itself contained no suspense, no surprises, no worries that the heroine wouldn't end up having a happily ever after, and gave the impression of having been written according to a very precise structure/framework/recipe into which various characters and side quirks could be inserted. (E.g., the heroine's best friend was [rifle through character types] a PhD student! And the heroine's side hobby is [rifle through odd-but-not-too-out-there hobbies] cheesemaking!) I think I've been reading too much queer lit lately, because what let the book down the most for me was that not once was there any epistemic possibility that maybe Fran would end up romantically involved with Issi, rather than one of the male antagonists. Now that would've been a fun turn of events (and save PhD student Issi from the ignominity of falling in love with a minor side character, getting married, AND having a kid before the book was over.)
20. Gaiman, Neil & Terry Pratchett, Good Omens (finished May 26, 2019): I've been wanting to reread this for awhile now, especially since finding out about the TV adaptation, so as soon as we moved house and started unpacking all the books that had been in boxes for years, I found it and started rereading it.
21. Gladstone, Max, Three Parts Dead (finished June 13, 2019): I can't remember who recommended this to me, but it was intriguing enough for me to put in my "books I'll buy when I need to buy something more on Amazon to get free shipping". It was a combination fantasy, steampunk, and legal thriller/mystery, and it provided me with good solid enjoyment (especially the legal wrangling!). Strong female characters, including a black FMC, and an intriguing religious set-up were further pluses. The book was good enough for me to bump up the sequel on my want list.
22. Gowar, Imogen Hermes, The Mermaid and Mrs. Hancock (finished March 24, 2019): I picked this up at the airport 10 days previously, intrigued by the blurb. I had to recalibrate my expectations a bit when I found out that despite the presence of mermaids in the story, it was straight up historical fiction, no fantasy or speculative elements. Nevertheless, it was an interesting story with distinctive characters, and my only complaint is that it reinforced my dislike of present-tense stories.
23. Harkness, Deborah, A Discovery of Witches (finished August 11, 2019): I wanted to love this book so much, and I just couldn't. The premise was great: A clever academic woman in her mid-30s stumbles across a missing medieval manuscript while researching in Oxford and witches are involved. But this book ranged from making me mildly bothered (the author is an academic historian herself, and she got so many historical details wrong!) to outright enraged (SO much patriarchy! SO much problematic vampirish stalking! SO much white-European-ness! SO much reduction of the main character to her role as first wife, and then mother; her academic expertise is never taken advantage of!). Just so, so disappointing.
24. Huff, Tanya, The Fire's Stone (finished July 8, 2019): This was another book that someone recommended somewhere so I added it to my amazon list and then bought it one time I needed to make up the difference to get free shipping. The first chapter or two were just okay, but then it really picked up and it became one of those books that taps into a crack of my heart and both fills it and makes it hurt. Two standout elements: Huff's portrayal of an alcoholic character, and a happily-ever-after for a polycule including two bi men. And while I'd love for this to be the first-of-many involving these characters, I also really appreciate a well-written standalone fantasy novel; there are not many of them.
25. Jones, Heather Rose, Floodtide (finished January 21, 2019): It is enormously satisfying to beta read a book you've been waiting for for two years or so.
26. Jones, Heather Rose, Floodtide (finished November 25, 2019): It's so interesting reading the published version after having betaed. This was the first time where I could tell what had been cut, and while I missed the characters that had been introduced in those chapters, I think the structure of the published version is cleaner and tighter and makes more sense. The book itself remains perhaps my favorite of the Alpennia books -- it flows along so easily and naturally. One thing I particularly liked about it was that you reach the titular floodtide, but that's not the end of the story -- in fact, it almost feels like the last few chapters are where the most important stuff happens. Too often, we never see the consequences of the resolution of a problem, but here, you do. Looking forward to when one of my nieces is of an age to buy this for her.
27. Jones, Heather Rose, Mother of Souls (finished October 14, 2019): I'd lent this to a friend and she returned it in August, and when I reached a gap in my other books I decided to reread this in advance of Floodtide coming out next month. Having had some distance from when I last read it, which was quite close after beta reading it, I found I got something different out of it from previously. The first two times I'd read it, I remember being perennial uncertain how time was passing; but that seemed much clearer this time around, and that made some of the relationships feel like they were developing more naturally. And, man, that final chapter, and the goosebumps it gives me...
28. Jones, Heather Rose, The Mystic Marriage (finished October 25, 2019): After having reread book 3, I had to go reread book 2. MM has never been my favorite of the Alpennia books, and there are still certain things about it that are stumbling blocks to my enjoyment. But everything else in it just seems to get better each time I read it. This time, I really appreciated the alchemical details. Jones makes alchemy seem entirely plausible, and yet still mystical.
29. Jones, Heather Rose, Daughter of Mystery (finished December 15, 2019): After having reread book 2, I had to go reread book 1. But I couldn't find book one!! I think I lent it to someone and haven't gotten it back yet. I'm okay with that, especially after a trip to York in early Dec. found me in an independent bookshop that had a copy of three of Jones's four books, so I bought myself a new copy of DoM. This is one of those books that gets better each time you read it. It was good the first time I read it; great the next couple of times; and this time, it was truly fabulous. I am in awe at Jones's ability to construct a story, not to mention the huge depth of world. And, oh, my heart, did I love rereading Barbara and Margerit before they were Barbara and Margerit.
30. Le Guin, Ursula K., Four Ways to Forgiveness (finished July 18, 2019): I sort of wonder where books like this were when I was growing up, why it was that I read the authors I did, and not authors like her. I found these four stories enormously more satisfying than I do her early Earthsea books, and reading them in such near succession to Russ's novel a very worthwhile, fruitful endeavor.
31. Lundoff, Catherine, ed., Scourge of the Seas of Time (And Space) (finished March 13, 2019): I reviewed this fun collection of pirate short stories over at SFFReviews. The highlight for me was Elliott Dunstan's "Andromache's War".
32. Montgomery, L. M., Anne of Windy Poplars (finished July 10, 2019): I was caught without a new book to read, so I reread an old favorite. This isn't my favorite of the Anne books (it might actually be my least favorite), but reading it through this time I was struck at how diverse Montgomery's characters are, and how I had not previously noticed this fully. The man with aphantasia, the woman who is either lesbian or ace, the diversity of appropriate lives that women could lead (okay, it's still curtailed, but there is a lot plenty of support for the idea that a woman needn't be married nor have children in order to have a fulfilled life). Montgomery continually goes up in my estimation as a writer, every time I reread something by her.
33. Moon, Elizabeth, Speed of Darkness (finished January 24, 2019): I really disliked this book. I think it is a book that actively contributes to ableism, problematic stereotypes, and a rigid "black/white" view of autism and 'normality'. I do not like the glorification of autism as something to be cured. I do not think she handled her characters sympathetically or realistically. Flowers for Algernon has already been written. This book did not need to be written.
34. Moore, Fiona, Driving Ambition (finished October 1, 2019): It's a book by a friend! Not the sort of book I usually go for, sort of a combination police thriller/mystery, but it kept me distracted through seasickness on the North Sea, which is saying a lot. At times I found the MC a bit mansplainy with his info-dumping, but it actually worked as a character feature (or flaw...) rather than being overwhelmingly infodumpy.
35. North, Sterling, Rascal (finished February 26, 2019): I loved this book as a child, and haven't read it in decades. I read it to G as bedtime stories over the course of about two months. Golly was it hard not to ugly cry while reading the final paragraphs out loud.
36. O'Dell, Claire, Hound of Justice (finished August 12, 2019): It took me a long time before I could write up my review of this book (usually I try to do these within a few days of finishing). Because this book hit me in the gut. Janet Watson is one of the realest, truest characters I have ever read, and the way in which O'Dell portrays her makes it so clear that Watson was written through first-hand knowledge. It's a hard read, as a result, sometimes, but it provides such a depth to the story. I don't really care about Sherlock Holmes retellings; but this was one of the best books I've read in 20109.
37. O'Dell, Claire, A Jewel-Bright Sea (finished early November 2019): What can I say? A new book by one of my favorite authors, set in the same universe as some of my favorite books? I loved it. I had the honor and pleasure of beta reading this book a few years back, and I was thrilled when it was picked up for publication -- and then disappointed to find out it was going to be ebook only! Thankfully, not for long! A few months after the ebook was published I was able to get a hard copy, which I devoured in like two nights. The story is beautifully paced and full of detail, and I love Anna and Andreas almost as much as I loved Ilse and Raul.
38. Osawa, Hirotaka, ed., Intelligence: Artificial and Human (finished December 28, 2019): This was a collection of eight short stories in translation by Japanese authors. I received a copy of this anthology in the hallway after a panel I was on at WorldCon in August, and it was a real delight to read and review the stories.
39. Parrish, Rhonda, ed., Grimm, Grit, and Gasoline (finished November 24, 2019): I reviewed this collection of dieselpunk short stories at SFFReviews.
40. Pratchett, Terry, The Truth (finished November 14, 2019): In the wake of the UK election season gearing up, I had to reread this. It was sadly far too much like nonfiction than fiction this time around.
41. Queer Sci Fi, Migration: Queer Sci Fi's 6th Annual Flash Fiction Contest (finished October 31, 2019): I had a story in last year's collection, and while mine didn't get selected for this year's, a friend of mine got her first publication out of it! So I ordered it in support of her, and because I do rather like the quickness of so many 300 word stories. Good value. Will definitely submit to next year's contest again, and probably buy the volume even if I don't get in.
42. Russ, Joanna, The Female Man (finished June 30, 2019): I don't remember whom recommend this to me, but I'm glad they did. It is equal parts riveting and horrifying -- every single thing a man says in this book, I could imagine being said in a quote in a contemporary Guardian article. How far we have (not) come since the 60s.
43. Setterfield, Diane, Once Upon a River (finished March 29, 2019): I picked this up at the airport on March 27, because I loved Setterfield's Thirteenth Tale, and found Bellman & Black interesting. OUaR had the same slightly gothic horror feel that TT had, and I was particularly satisfied by the ending. The more short and long speculative fiction I read, the more I come to feel that happy endings are way harder to master than unhappy ones, so when they're done well, they're very satisfying.
44. Simmonds, Dan, Drood (finished May 3, 2019): I have no idea how I acquired this book (possibly mom gave it to me?). But the day I'd finished up my last airport book and was looking for the next thing to read, there it was, lying on the shelf. It was big and thick and written by an author whose other works I liked (and when it came to Simmonds' Hyperion, that was one of the best books I had read in a long time, when I read it a few years ago). Drood wasn't as good as Hyperion, but it was still very good, despite how ponderous it was. Three things stuck out for me: Reading this book was the first time that I actually thought "I want to read Dickens"; Simmonds did an amazing job at capturing 19th C sensibilities, which unfortunately means the racism and sexism in the book is often incredibly distastefully hard to read, because it is so overt and so unquestioned; and I kept having a suspicion that it was going to turn out to be an "unreliable narrator" story in its resolution, and now that I've finished it, I'm not sure if that was the case or not, and I sort of wish it had had a neater denoument. Still, a good book, and it kept me occupied for a few weeks rather than a few days!
45. Stephenson, Neil, Anathem (finished March 15, 2019): My mom got me this for Christmas (which was in mid-February, 2019). It's been quite awhile since I've read ponderous SFF by a white man, and the first few chapters were a bit too ponderous and a bit too white male, and I was uncertain how far I'd get. And then something changed -- not sure what, and not sure where or why -- and I realised that this book was basically written purely to satisfy the needs and desires and niche interests of people like me. It was astonishing, and fun, and honestly, the next time I teach Introduction to Philosophy I'm simply going to make my students read this and then find out which real-world philosopher is being represented by which fictional saunt.
46. Stevermer, Caroline, A College of Magics (finished February 4, 2019): My friend Irina recommended this book to me in summer 2017, but it took me this long to get my hands on a copy. It was well worth the wait. It's the sort of book you consume hungrily and greedily, and leaves you burning for more.
47. Suri, Tasha, Empire of Sand (finished December 9, 2019): Another WorldCon recommendation. Highly recommended. I loved the medieval Indian setting, I found the worldbuilding spectacular, I loved the characters, and I liked the somewhat didactic tone the book sometimes took. This was a real winner of a recommendation, and I'm putting book 2 onto my "want list".
48. Tákacs, Bogi, The Trans Space Octopus Congregation Stories (finished November 17, 2019): I reviewed this for SFFReviews; it's a collection of short stories and some of them were really good.
49. Thomas, Angie, On the Come Up (finished April 5, 2019): Picked this up from the airport, scouting out the young adult section. This was just as good as The Hate U Give, and I finished it in a single day. Both of Thomas's books are so different from what I usually read, and reading them feels like an epistemic experience that I could not get in any other way. I'll repeat what I said in reviewing THUG: Every white person should read this book.
50. Townsend, Sue, The Woman Who Went to Bed For a Year (finished May 17, 2019): G's school library has a box of books that parents are encouraged to "borrow" (for 50p each, and we have to bring them back) so that kids see their parents reading. (Not an issue in our house.) I picked this book up from the basket because I saw the title and felt an immediate kinship. Unfortunately, the title was the only redeeming part of the book. Not a single character was realistic or sympathetic; most of the time, they read as if written by someone who'd never actually met people before, and certainly had never met university professors specialising in astronomy. The crass racism, sexism, and ableism that was rampant throughout the book was also extremely off-putting. I think I cracked a smile once, and the only moment of true pleasure it brought was when Calabi-Yau sequences were mentioned and I thought "I recognise that term, and I once knew what they are." Overall, do not recommend, and on the strength of this book I will probably never read anything else by this author.
51. Trelease, Gita, Enchantée (finished April 5, 2019): I bought this from the young adult section at the airport book store on the strength of the beautiful front cover and a moderately interesting back blurb, and expected it to be one a solid but not stellar book. I was pleasantly surprised! Revolutionary Paris was drawn richly and beautifully, the magical system was both central to the story and backgrounded in a way to make it seem ordinary and natural, I loved the diversity of the characters, and even more I loved the way it drew upon classic Cinderella story elements without ever being a straight-up retelling. I'd love to read more by Trelease.
52. van Rooyen, Suzanne, Scardust (finished October 8, 2019): Recommendation from the internet (can't remember who/where). This was a 2-night book; it would've been a 1-night book if I hadn't started it after having finished another book the same night, so I ran out of time. It was totally different from what I normally read; normally I specifically avoid stories where rape and/or abuse feature as important plot points, but the soul-sucking realism of the early part of this story struck me as being important to read: This is the reality for some people's lives, and it's not necessarily good for me to ignore or pretend that that's not the case. The characters were strongly crafted and gripping, and the very satisfying ending took me by surprise. Recommended, with caveats.
53. Wakes, Damon L., Ten Little Astronauts (finished December 4, 2019): I was offered a review copy of this collection of two novellas, and my review of it will show up on SFFReviews in January.
54. Walsh, Jessica, Little Creepers (finished May 7, 2019): I reviewed this collection of short (mostly horror) stories at SFFReviews.
55. Watterson, Bill, Calvin & Hobbes: 10th Anniversary Edition (finished November 2, 2019): G and I read through this one as bedtime stories. It was sort of a "greatest hits" collection, with certain story arcs featured. What I enjoyed was that some of them were introduced with a brief commentary by Watterson, and what I found interesting was that I was able to read that introduction silently to myself at the same time as I read aloud the comics to G -- a feat that I would not have imagined possible if you had suggested I try.

Non-fiction

1. Bydén, Börje and Christina Thomsen Thörnqvist, eds., The Aristotelian Tradition: Aristotle's Works on Logic and Metaphysics and Their Reception in the Middle Ages (finished June 11, 2019): I read this to review for Revista Española de Filosofía Medieval. Spoiler: It was good, but patchy in its coverage.
2. Hughes, John, ed., The Letters of Abelard and Heloise, with a Particular Account of their Lives, Amours, and Misfortunes: Extracted Chiefly from Monsieur Bayle...To Which are Added Four Poems, by Mr. Pope and Other Hands (finished February 6, 2019): I'll confess, I skipped the poems. And the rest...I hadn't expected as much stomach curdling misogyny and patriarchy as I found. Not recommended.
3. Ladd, Christine, "On the Algebra of Logic" (finished January 15, 2019): I'm counting this as a book, because of its length, and the fact it was a PhD thesis. This was another "started in 2018, finished in 2019" book, because I read it at a rate of 3-5 pages per day, only 1-2 days a week.
4. de Pisan, Christine, The Treasure of the City of Ladies (finished February 27 or 28, 2019): This was not nearly as rewarding as the letters of Abelard & Heloise; I ranted quite a bit on twitter about how Christine is not the feminist ancestress so many women are looking for (cf. especially here)
5. Wilson, Robin and Amirouche Moktefi, eds., The Mathematical World of Charles L. Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) (finished July 11, 2019): I read this to review it for the Lewis Carroll Review. It was excellent. The reviews editor liked my review enough that she also put it up on the reviews section of the British Society for Literature and Science website.

How do we (teach students to) ask questions?

Yesterday I gave a talk with this title at Nottingham Philosophy's departmental colloquium. The post below isn't a transcription of the talk but it's the notes I wrote up on the train down which I mostly followed when speaking. I'm reproducing the notes here unchanged, not because I didn't get loads of useful feedback from the Q&A, but because I don't have the time to amend/augment it now, and in any case I'm planning to take this and try to turn it into an actual journal paper.

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I'd like to thank Matthew and the rest of you for the invitation to come give a talk, because it gives me an opportunity to explore some things that I spend a lot of time thinking about but which I feel like we (as a profession) spend very little time talking about – either with each other or with our students. I know from Matthew and Ian that Nottingham is a very open and pluralistic department, so I wanted to do something a little bit different. This is going to be more of an interactive exercise where I get you guys to think reflectively about a bunch of stuff and then share your thoughts with each other and with me. It's primarily selfish in nature: I want to get better at this, so I want to get as much different input as I can.

What is philosophy?

1. Is it content?

   Is it about who our predecessors are, and what they thought? Is it names, dates, influences, concepts, theories, questions, applications, problems, paradoxes? [If it is, what distinguishes philosophy from history of philosophy?] Is it about investigating fundamental reality?

2. (2) Is it method?

   Or is it method? Can any topic be philosophical so long as we apply certain kinds (the right kinds?) of methods to it?

   What are the methods? Formal logic; informal logic; concept analysis; phenomenology; thought experiments; etc.

One needn't place themselves firmly in one camp or the other – it's possible to take any position on the spectrum between these two extremes, and probably most philosophers find themselves somewhere in the middle. But if hard pressed to come up with a means of excluding philosophy from non-philosophy, each of you will end up favoring one side or another.

Why is it important to know where you stand on this issue? It's because it relates to another topic, namely:

What are we teaching when we teach undergraduates philosophy?

3. Is it philosophy?
4. Is it how to be a philosopher?

These are not quite the same question as the previous question, but if you say the answer is (3) then whether you take (1) or (2) will make a difference.

Think back to your own undergraduate career. What did you learn? What courses were you required to take? In the US, I had to do history of ancient and history of modern; I had to take at least one ethics course; I had to take at least one logic course. For the rest, I had choice, but the classes I took tended to focus on particular areas/subfields/figures in philosophy: Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein; philosophy of language; metaphysics; epistemology; philosophy of math. As I got higher up (and started taking grad classes) I got focused topics like compositionality and vagueness and logicism. But there was a very clear sense that we were learning who the important figures, themes, concepts, developments in philosophy were. In only one case did I get the feeling that my professor was teaching me what he was teaching me because he thought it was right (Terry Penner doing Plato was amazing.)

If there was an expectation that we would learn how to be philosophers, it was that this would fall out of reading and seeing how the great philosophers did philosophy. (This is, if you think about it, an interesting pedagogical assumption. Would we expect people to learn how to become engineers by reading/seeing how other engineers do engineering? Would we expect people to learn how to write fiction by reading/seeing how other authors write fiction? It's a pedagogical technique that seems more appropriate in some cases than in others, and not appropriate across the board: So we must ask the question, "Is it appropriate for philosophy?")

Does anyone else's experiences differ from mine?

Anyway, the takeaway I took from this, as a student, is that this is what I was supposed to teach my own (undergraduate) students – that there were certain figures, concepts, disputes, etc. that any student having gotten a philosophy degree should come away with some degree of knowledge/familiarity with. (Let me just say as an aside here that this is where questions of canon come in…questions I'm not going to talk about so much, but not because I don't think they're important.) So if I was teaching philosophy of language, I should teach people about Frege/Sense/Reference; Russell/Donnellan/Kaplan/definite descriptions; Kripke; possibly Geach. Maybe at a higher level I could teach semantics, and compositionality, and theories of truth.

That's what I should teach…but what I really wanted to teach was all the ways in which philosophy of language gets fiction wrong, and how to deal with lies, and what do we mean by "meaning" and "nonsense" and "meaningless", and the problems fanfiction causes. But if I did that, then I'd have to give up on giving them the broad foundation in the historical debates and developments – there simply isn't enough time.

But what if what we were really supposed to be doing was teaching students how to do philosophy or how to be philosophers?

Then all the things I wanted to be teaching them and talking to them about, I could. But if that's what our goal is, then I think for the most part, we don't do a very good job at it.

In my capacity as director of undergrad dissertations at Durham, the biggest thing concern I've seen over the years is that students don't really know how to come up with dissertation topics. They look at the grand topics they've covered in their classes – the problem of evil, why is there something rather than nothing, what are numbers, etc. – and worry (quite rightly) that (a) they can't come up with a grand topic like this; (b) if they do, they won't be able to come up with an original contribution; (c) if they do, they can't adequately discuss it in 12k. Or, they look at the sorts of essay topics they're given in their classes or exams, and try to come up with something that sounds like that, and invariably end up with something clunky, awkward, and not very much fun.

My first experience with teaching (UK) students how to come up with their own questions was a few years ago when I taught a 2nd year course on Language, Logic, and Reality. I talked with the other person running the module and we agreed on a plan. The course had one formative paper and two summative papers. The formative paper, we would give them one question – everyone had to write on it. (It tied back to the very first lecture when I wrote three quotes up on the board – one in medieval Welsh, one in Sindarin, and one in Linear B. We asked them whether the quote in Linear B was meaningful, and why/why not.) The second paper we had around 7 pre-set questions students could choose from. But their final paper, they had to come up with their own topic. We told them this at the very beginning of the year, and provided a lot of "and this would be an EXCELLENT topic for your final paper" during lectures and discussions. We also arranged for my students to talk to the other lecturer to get their questions vetted, and vice versa, so that no one ended up picking something unreasonable for 3000 words. These final papers were across the board a much higher quality than the other ones.

But I can't recall how many people I had in my office telling me things like "I didn't know that I could talk about X in philosophy" or "Is this philosophical enough?" (Those two words are the bane of my existence). The worry whether something is "philosophical enough" connects to a concern that philosophy is demarcated by its subject matter, rather than its method, and that if one wants to talk about something in a philosophical context one must relate it back and anchor it in that subject matter. Whereas if one things that philosophy is a matter of method, then anything can be philosophical enough. It was working with students that convinced them that method is the way forward, and that method is what we should be teaching them, and what we should be teaching them explicitly.

(Side note: As a graduate student in the US, I remember being utterly baffled how my compatriots wrote journal articles. How did one come up with an idea that was suited to an article? I didn't have much problem writing seminar papers, but journal articles seemed a very different thing, and not once did I get any explicit guidance as to what the difference is or how I should approach one vs. the other.)

So how do we teach students to ask questions? Well, here's how I teach them:

When students are in my office wondering what to write their dissertations on, I have a surefire method of finding them a topic that excites and interests them. First, I ask them what interests them outside of philosophy. What do they read, what do they listen to, what do they watch, what do they talk about with friends, what are their hobbies? [Only once did I have a student tell me he had no hobbies.] Then, I ask them what interests them in philosophy – is it ethics, is it metaphysics, is it epistemology, is it language/logic? That is…are they interested in what is right? What is? What we know? How we say true things about it/draw inferences about it? Finally, I ask them: What's in the intersection. There's your thesis topic.

But that just gets a topic. How does one know what to say about it? These are the questions I have them go through:

• What do you want to know?
• What would count as an answer to this question? How are you going to discriminate between things that answer the question and things that don't?
• What would count as a good answer to this question? How are you going to discriminate between competing answers? What are your foundational principles, the things that you cannot give up? What is the purpose of this answer (are you looking for something functional, moral, epistemological, etc.)? State these at the beginning of what you are writing, as part of your motivation.
• Then, once you've answered the question…who cares? Why does it matter? What has changed as a result of having this answer? What must change as a result of having this answer? Does having this answer affect our behavior? Does it affect what philosophical position we must adopt to remain consistent? Does it change the philosophical landscape by either removing or adding possible positions? What difference does it make?

These are, at the heart of it, the questions I think philosophers should be asking, whatever other questions they ask. Do not ask "Why is there something rather than nothing?" or "What is a fact?" unless you have some idea of what could possibly count as an answer, and some idea of what could possibly count as a good answer. And when it's boiled down to this, these are fairly straightforward things to teach students to ask.

Answering them, on the other hand… is another matter altogether.