![]() To make a long story bearably short, a few years later I got a job at the City University of New York, where I have now the incredible luck of being a tenured professor with wonderful colleagues, interesting students, and the luxury of spending most of my days doing what I love: reading, writing, and teaching. ![]() Lastly, all of the above reminded me of just how much I had enjoyed my (mandatory) three years of philosophy classes back in high school when I was growing up in Rome. He is a brilliant philosopher of biology, and I learned a lot from him. Third, I met Jonathan Kaplan, now at Oregon State, who became my friend and then PhD mentor when I decided to pursue philosophy seriously (we ended up co-authoring a number of papers, as well as my dissertation). ![]() Second, I realized that - although I was running an experimental lab - what interested me most where questions that biologists refer to as “conceptual,” and conceptual questions in science are only a few short steps removed from philosophy (of science). Sure, I thought, I could go on doing what I had been done since my days as an undergraduate at the University of Rome, but I sensed that it would have been an increasingly unfulfilling matter of coasting for the rest of my professional life. I gingerly went along my academic path for a couple of decades or so, and then a few things happened that eventually led me to the unusual decision of shifting career.įirst, I was about 40, and experiencing a mild case of mid-life crisis. My area of expertise became what biologists call gene-environment interactions, and philosophers refer to as nature-vs-nurture. You see, I was originally trained (in Italy, at first, then at the University of Connecticut) as an evolutionary biologist. ![]() But it is intended in the same spirit of philosophical inquiry that Whitehead tried to capture with his famous quip.īy way of further introduction, allow me tell you a bit about my own rather unusual path to philosophy. This new column, which the Editors at TPM have kindly agreed to begin publishing, isn’t going to be about Plato, or ancient philosophy (well, occasionally, maybe). Moreover, we keep reading Plato as a source of intellectual inspiration. And yet, we keep using that mode of inquiry - philosophy - and we keep working on many of the same questions that Plato and his ilk were pondering while walking the streets of Athens and suburbs. He did not invent that way of thinking (there was Socrates before him, and of course the aptly named pre-Socratics!), and subsequent philosophizing showed him wrong or significantly off course in almost everything he wrote. He was, rather, saying that Plato is a towering figure for an entire way of thinking about fundamental questions. Whitehead was not saying that Plato got the major contours of philosophy figured out, and that the intervening two and a half millennia have just been a matter of filling the gaps. His personal endowments, his wide opportunities for experience at a great period of civilization, his inheritance of an intellectual tradition not yet stiffened by excessive systematization, have made his writing an inexhaustible mine of suggestion.” I allude to the wealth of general ideas scattered through them. Put in its proper context, the quote continues: “I do not mean the systematic scheme of thought which scholars have doubtfully extracted from his writings. 39): “The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.” Then again, the phrase comes from the famous quip by Alfred North Whitehead, who wrote in his Process and Reality (Free Press, 1979, p. The title of this new column hosted by TPM Online is, admittedly, a bit ambitious. Massimo Pigliucci introduces his new regular column.
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