Ernest Sosa's Intellectual Autobiography

Soochow Journal of Philosophical Studies No. 42 (August 2020), 105-143 © Soochow University Ernest Sosa’s Intellectual Autobiography Ernest Sosa Preface The following is an imaginary interview with Ernest Sosa, conducted by the imaginary Q(uestioner). It combines content from four actual interviews as follows: first, one in Five Questions for Epistemologists, conducted by Vincent Hendricks and Duncan Pritchard; second, one conducted by Juan Comesaña, and published more than a decade ago, in the now defunct Ephilosopher; third, one conducted by Richard Marshall, and published in 3:AM Magazine on Friday, September 16th, 2016; finally, fourth, one conducted by Amrei Bahr and Markus Seidel of the University of Münster, in January of 2017, and published in a German journal, Information Philosophie. This exercise in imagination provides a sort of intellectual autobiography, and enables broad reflection on the discipline of philosophy, and epistemology in particular. Editor’s Note: Ernest Sosa (born June 17, 1940) has been honored as “one of the most important epistemologists of the last half-century”. He is also credited as the founder of contemporary virtue epistemology. To celebrate his 80th birthday, and to pay tribute to his great contributions to the world and his outstanding achievement in philosophy, the editor of Soochow Journal of Philosophical Studies specially invites Sosa to compose an intellectual autobiography for the journal. Sosa deliberately designs this autobiography in the mode of an imaginary interview, which is quite characteristic of his own writing style, by combining four of his previous actual interviews. The outcome here not only manifests his virtuous thoughts, but also his skillful reflection on philosophy in general. Distinguished Professor, Department of Philosophy, Rutgers University 106 Soochow Journal of Philosophical Studies, No. 42 Intellectual Autobiography Q: How did your interest in philosophy arise? ES: I had little conception of philosophy until near the end of my college years. I had been taking mostly science courses, which I found interesting but ultimately unsatisfying because so often I wanted to question things that of course had to be taken for granted. I had no idea that there was a discipline that prizes radical questioning. I later realized that my natural inclinations had not until then received a favorable outlet. Q: What made you become a philosopher? ES: In those college years I was often intrigued by philosophical questions that my fellow students dismissed. At that point I had not come across “philosophy,” so named. Only right before my senior year did I find Bertrand Russell, which led to a year full of philosophy (almost exclusively) at the University of Miami, with Ramon Lemos as main professor, then two years of graduate work at the ascendant University of Pittsburgh, with Nicholas Rescher as main professor, followed by a year of full time teaching at the University of Western Ontario and a two-year postdoc at Brown, with Roderick Chisholm as mentor. (Short graduate careers were not unusual in those days of enormous growth in higher education.) I became and remained a philosopher because, through their writings, teaching, and discussion, brilliant people nourished and shared the philosophical curiosity that came so naturally to me. Q: You have published on almost every sub-discipline of philosophy that I can think of (including, of course, epistemology and metaphysics, but also logic, philosophy of mind, theory of action, metaphilosophy, philosophy of language, and ethics). Was exercising your broad interests something unproblematic for you, or did you ever feel any pressure, of any kind, towards specialization? ES: I have sometimes thought that it might have been better to specialize Ernest Sosa’s Intellectual Autobiography 107 earlier and more intensively. That might have led to books where I published articles. I suppose it was self-indulgent to just follow my interests of the moment, or of the year. On the other hand, one benefit of philosophy is to give us a view, if only a glimpse, of how things hang together, as Sellars once put it. Even masters of close analysis, like Chisholm and Moore, take up an impressively broad spread of issues. Q: What do you think is the proper role of epistemology in relation to other areas of philosophy and other academic disciplines? ES: Epistemology in my view has its own autonomy and integrity, and does not depend on interdisciplinary relations. All the same, it must not resist or avoid such relations. On the contrary, epistemology is enriched through cross-fertilizing relations to other subfields of our discipline and to nearby areas in other disciplines altogether. In recent years and decades, epistemology has benefited from its relations to philosophy of mind, cognitive science, and philosophy of language. In earlier decades it had already interacted fruitfully with metaphysics, as in the controversies concerning the ontology of perception in the first half of the twentieth century. Metaethics and moral epistemology are also relevant here, as is the epistemology of the a priori sciences. Finally, the epistemology of philosophy itself is drawing intense attention in recent years. Q: What do you think the future of epistemology will (or should) hold? ES: I have no idea. In fact, on fundamentals I anticipate no dramatic shift. The main, fundamental questions that most interest me are those that interested Plato in his Theaetetus and Descartes in his Meditations, and some of interest to Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics, to mention only some highlights in the history of our discipline. The span of options presented by the issues taken up in those great works are among those we still debate today. I expect that they are ones we’ll still debate tomorrow, or anyhow soon after tomorrow, as the transient issues of the day recede in due course, however fascinating they may be in their full momentary specificity. 108 Soochow Journal of Philosophical Studies, No. 42 Q: Why were you initially drawn to epistemology (and what keeps you interested)? ES: Several bits of luck first drew me to epistemology. Although at work on my dissertation while holding my first job in philosophy, I had not yet committed to any long-term research program, nor even to a subfield. I had come to philosophy late, in the summer between my junior and senior years as an undergraduate at the University of Miami, when I first encountered interesting philosophical texts, especially the writings of Bertrand Russell. These I found by accident, while browsing in a bookstore. My senior year then consisted of twelve philosophy courses, after which I went for graduate work to the University of Pittsburgh, the only place where I applied. As a college senior I had been too naïve, too busy with my twelve courses, and with no philosophy record to support my application. I got into Pitt because when I applied it was still a lowly program. (By contrast, my six fellow graduating seniors at the wonderful Miami department all won multi-year fellowships at excellent graduate programs.) Already as I traveled on my bus trip from Miami to Pittsburgh at the end of that summer, however, the Pitt department was beginning its meteoric rise from its then lowly status to the lofty heights that it soon reached, and has since then remarkably retained. During my one undergraduate philosophy year I had no course in epistemology, nor did I have any in my two years of graduate work at Pitt. Only in my first year of teaching, at the University of Western Ontario, did I come across a question in epistemology that gripped me immediately, and that would never afterwards release its grip. The question was that of the nature of knowledge, which I had encountered already by reading the Theaetetus in a Plato course. It had not then aroused my interest, however, not as it would in the form given to it by Ed Gettier in his celebrated note. I came across Gettier’s paper while leafing through the pages of Analysis at the Western Ontario library. The first few sentences went by swiftly, as I stood next to the periodicals shelf, but I was soon struggling with the counterexamples, testing in my head successive revisions of the JTB analysis. The problem was not to be solved by Ernest Sosa’s Intellectual Autobiography 109 those shelves, however, and I was soon settled into a comfortable library seat for some extended thought. Eventually I had a solution to propose and it was, I believe, the second published attempt to solve the Gettier problem, appearing in the 1964 Analysis volume. Having sent my paper off, I awaited on tenterhooks the Editor’s eventually favorable response, but another bit of excellent news preceded that: I was granted a two-year postdoctoral fellowship at Brown University. Upon arrival at Brown, with the Pitt diploma in my bags, I immediately came under the spell of someone with a philosophical style and persona the likes of which I had never come across: Roderick Chisholm, then at the height of his creativity. I soon joined several excellent graduate students, and some young faculty, including Jaegwon Kim, in auditing Chisholm’s seminar every semester. I still had taken no course in epistemology, but of course had been thinking about epistemology in my solitary struggle with the Gettier problem. Chisholm’s seminars were my first formal introduction to epistemology. He did not by then teach the subject often, as his teaching had switched to metaphysics. But he was still at work in the field, and to my delight would regularly invite me to discuss his ideas with him. At that point we still did not have individual computers, so our conversations were either through regular mail, or in person, or most often by telephone.

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