The CFCP Mission

The official mission of the CFCP is to encourage and promote new work in and around philosophy that sheds light on the nature, sources, structure, dynamics, and consequences of interpersonal conflict at all scales. (In the early days of COVID isolation when I didn’t have a commute and it seemed like I had all the time in the world for new projects like making sourdough, there was also time to try to convey this mission statement in an explainer video:)

Trajectory

The CFCP’s mission is one that I actually find I believe in more deeply with each passing year, in large part because of the tremendously enthusiastic response that I’ve seen from so many of the people who have participated in some way in the life of the CFCP.

When we began in January 2020, I had no budget at all for the CFCP except for what I was paying out of pocket, and it was just me and three supportive colleagues who were interested in bringing in a series of workshop speakers by videochat (in those early days we pronounced the verb ‘Zoom’ so that it sounded like ‘Skype’). But since then, nearly eighty people have served as past or present fellows of the CFCP. We’ve hosted over fifty workshops, seven conferences, and eight public lectures, and enthusiasm and interest in the kind of work that we are encouraging and promoting and in the kind of space within philosophy in which these kinds of conversations are normal has grown continuously. I now have enough internal support from USC to continue this work for the next few years. With luck, I hope to do much more.

Investment

Part of the investment that graduate fellows of the CFCP make, is not just the commitment to attend most CFCP events for the year, and to participate in a continuing conversation that takes place in the form of regular “Fellows’ Lunches”, but to contribute in small ways to the service that makes the CFCP run - chairing a session, taking notes, coordinating calendars, etc. In the last two years the graduate fellows have contributed to a blog on the CFCP website, and starting this year, some of those entries will be cross-posted here as guest contributions to this Substack.

When you see a guest post in this space, it is from a graduate student - usually a PhD student and often in philosophy, but we have so far had graduate fellows from politics, religion, sociology, and from a marriage and family therapy program - who has committed to participate in the life and work of the CFCP for at least one year, and is sharing a slice of where their own work and research interests intersect with the CFCP’s mission. In addition to the individual merits of each contribution, if you follow along I guarantee that you will be as impressed as I have been with the fruitfulness of organizing inquiry in this way!

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One of the secrets I divulge to all of my PhD students is that the best way to make progress on any difficult question is to try to bring to it something that no one has brought before. This point is so important as a general principle about research in any field that it was the one I tried to make in the quote from me that Steve Pyke used with my photo in his second volume of Philosophers:

The lesson that I try to urge on all of my students is that this is the fundamental theorem of all productive research - you have to have an unhealthy level of confidence in yourself to think that simply staring at the same problem that other people have stared at and reading the same things that they have read will lead you to make significant progress that they haven’t. In all probability that isn’t going to work out for you, and even if it does, expecting it to isn’t rational, no matter how capable you are.

This (the Fundamental Theorem) is the reason why interdisciplinary research is so often fecund, and why progress is often rapid when questions are posed for the first time, when they are re-framed or precisified, and when technology opens the prospect of new research techniques. And crucially, it is the secret reason why leading researchers in every field are able to stay at the cutting edge of their field - they get a head start on understanding the next problems raised by their own research before anyone else does.

Archipelagic research

In my own research career, I have benefited from this secret sauce over and over again. Even as I have taken advantage of the liberty that philosophy grants to be able to pursue questions ranging from ethics to epistemology to mind and metaphysics to the philosophy of language and the history of philosophy, nearly every time I have turned my attention to a new question it has been with the benefit of already seeing some connection or beachhead that I can bring to it from things that I have already figured out (or “figured out”) from related areas of philosophy - a virtual guarantee of bringing at least some perspective that no one else has brought before.

When you can already see your landing point on a new research topic or question, that makes it more likely that you are going to be able to learn something new about it that others haven’t seen yet - and makes it reasonable to maintain confidence that this is so even on low points along the journey to get there. One of the most amazing and delightful things about philosophy, in my experience, is that so many topics are connected - and so you really can explore a great deal of the ocean simply by setting out to map your archipelago from where you begin.

(This is also why I tend to cringe at the idea of a “generalist”, in philosophy, even though I have myself been attracted to working in many different subfields and have supervised PhD students in many as well. Or maybe it is the idea of this label being applied to me that I find cringeworthy! When I hear “generalist”, I imagine someone who uses their GPS map to paradrop onto a few of their favorite islands, picked out by the aesthetics of their postcards. The Fundamental Theorem can still lead to productive research in this way, provided that you have some generic enough tools that haven’t been brought to these islands before, but it feels arrogant to me to think that I might.)

Striking across the ocean

I can actually only identify two times in my career, at least after graduate school, when I have genuinely struck out onto something totally new, where I could not identify how any of my previous work gave me any leverage. In each case, this felt a bit like setting out Moana-esquely across the ocean in hopes of finding land, but without the navigational tools to be confident yet that I would be in any better position to find it than anyone else.

Both, it turns out, were cases where I was grappling with really important questions about my own lived experience. I don’t think that I would have had the confidence to sustain pursuing either of these questions seriously as part of my academic research, if not for the fact that having gotten far enough out onto the ocean, I lucked into something that looked enough like it might be land to keep me going. But I do think that part of what motivated me in each case was the sense that it mattered to get the answer right. There was something that I was struggling with in my own life that I couldn’t settle without coming to an answer.

The first time that this happened to me, I was gripped with a struggle to understand why every time I had to make a major life decision, it seemed so transformatively illuminating to recast the question through the lens of what I might regret. (Leading to this talk and this paper, both of whose titles assure me that you will regret not clicking through.) And the second time that it happened to me was the beginning of my journey to apply philosophy to thinking about interpersonal conflict.

My biggest surprise? Somehow these two topics ended up, for me, having something to do with one another - to be proximal islands in a new archipelago accessed across different swaths of open sea. Though I’m still working out exactly how to map their relationship!

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“Philosophy? I love philosophy!”

As everyone with a PhD in philosophy knows, there are two ways that things can go, if you ever make the mistake of letting slip to a stranger that you study or teach philosophy. The first, of course, is the awkward silence that comes from someone who doesn’t really know what to say next - either because they have no idea what philosophy is, or because they are afraid to tell you what they think about it.

But Ludovico (my Uber driver) fell into the other category. He had the utmost enthusiasm for philosophy and its potential to tell us about Zen and the meaning of life. It would have broken my heart to explain to him how carefully I had argued in the Philosophical Review that ‘ought’ has control rather than raising syntax, or in my first peer-reviewed journal article about how to read the anaphora in a long sentence in Kant that translators sometimes break into two (still long!) sentences.

Ludovico holds out hope that philosophy matters in a way that it is sometimes easy to lose track of, for those of us who spend our days doing research in philosophy.

Problems big and small

One of the things that analytic philosophy is particularly good at, is breaking large and intractable problems down into smaller problems that it is easier to get a grip on. What I tell my undergraduates is that this is essentially why philosophers care so much about arguments and validity. A well-constructed argument can take a question that would be settled by its conclusion and offer us a path to explore it by separating out the question of whether each of its premises is true. This path isn’t guaranteed to answer our original question, but it offers us a path forward when we aren’t sure what else will settle it.

But analytic philosophers are also particularly good at breaking down unwieldy questions in other ways. Instead of asking ‘what is the self’?, we take slices at it, like asking ‘is this person at this time the same person as this one at this later time?’ or ‘when that person took that action, were they really acting autonomously?’

Breaking large questions and problems down into smaller ones is the philosophical skill par excellence, because what distinguishes philosophy is that its questions are hard. So breaking hard questions down into ones that promise to be easier is in a way the general form of identifying possible ways of making progress.

Putting things back together

A lot of the work that I have done in my career is of the taking things apart variety. But Ludovico challenges us all, from time to time, not to forget to put things back together. If we really do care about the big questions with which we started, then part of the challenge is always to reassemble the pieces of the puzzle that we got by taking things apart.

I am a big believer both in our responsibility to do so, and in what the possibility of doing so tells us about how much of philosophy matters - even when that is easy to lose track of.

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Arguments as WMDs

When I was an undergraduate, I was attracted to the allure of the idea that a well-constructed argument is the ultimate philosophical weapon. The ideal of the perfect argument, on this picture, is something that absolutely compels compliance because of its devastatingly inescapable rational force.

There are plausibly a handful of such arguments in the history of philosophy - though it is hard to avoid noticing that philosophers are going to disagree even about which these are. But most philosophical progress doesn’t look like this. So either there is something else that constructing arguments can do for us, or most of philosophy is simply a failure, at least when it comes to the role of arguments. I have learned far too much from philosophy for the latter conclusion to be at all plausible, so I infer that there is something else for arguments to do.

Argument value pluralism

For about a decade I taught my students a kind of pluralism about the value of arguments. Arguments might be useful as tools of rational persuasion, for example, and if we start from this idea it is not so hard to motivate the thought that to have this use, arguments must be valid, and to make the further point that for the most useful such arguments, the relevant notion of validity must be a formal one.

Alternatively, I offered, arguments can be ways by which we learn. Again, if we start from this value, it is not so hard to explain why we can only learn with confidence from arguments that are valid - and that we can do so most safely only if the relevant notion of validity is a formal one.

You might think of each of these values as constituting a kind of retreat from the idea of arguments as weapons of devastatingly inescapable rational force, but as retreating from it in different ways. For a number of years, I was happy enough with this way of explaining things not to need to change up my slides or revisit the explainer videos that I had developed so that no student who missed class would be unequipped for the argument-related tasks I was asking them to perform on assignments.

Breaking up Questions

But then a few years ago I began developing a new introductory undergraduate course, in which I wanted to spend less time on arguments and more time introducing and explicitly practicing other kinds of philosophy skills. So I had to revisit the story that I had been telling my students about arguments and ask myself which parts I needed to keep, and which could be dispensed with, while still leaving enough for them to have learned something substantial and translatable.

What I came up with ties the general purpose of arguments more closely to my conception of what is distinctive of philosophy in the first place. Philosophy, I claim, is distinguished precisely by the fact that it encompasses all and only those questions that we don’t yet know exactly how to answer. Philosophy is not distinguished by any particular method, on this picture, but rather by the tenacity and determination to apply whatever methods seem most helpful in making these questions easier to get a handle on.

Still, though there is no distinctive single “method” of philosophy, I do think that there is something especially distinctive about the task of breaking bigger questions down into smaller parts. No matter what difficult question we are asking, there is no question that we have made progress if we have managed to break it down into two or more less difficult questions. If we can keep going in that way, then patience and the ability to eventually put things back together are the only things keeping us from making progress.

What I like about this picture

There is a sense in which this picture is slightly too pat. When I use an argument of the form modus ponens to break the question of whether Q down into the question of whether P and the question of whether if P, then Q, it is not exactly true that we have replaced one bigger question with two potentially smaller ones. We only answer the question whether Q in this way if our answers to each of these other questions are ‘yes’. So there is something about it that I can quite say simply and without qualification and with a straight face at the same time.

Nevertheless, I like that it offers a more satisfying answer about why arguments are so important and useful in philosophy - and of why they are bound to be useful in any career or walk of life. I like that it casts arguments from the beginning in the constructive mode, rather than in the antagonism of metaphors of offense or defense. I think this can be better to prepare students to be open-minded when considering arguments - certainly it helps me to do so.

And I like that it helps to offer a simple answer to why it is that doing philosophy well can sometimes - inevitably, even - take us progressively further and further away from the compelling questions that we originally set out to answer. It is not wrong to try to make progress on hard questions by breaking them down into easier ones, but so long as those questions are still hard in the way of philosophy, this leaves us in the same place in continuing to try to make progress, and soon we are investigating things that seem far away from where we started - and whose importance can sometimes be hard to explain to nonspecialists who haven’t traveled the same argumentative road as we have.

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Course themes

The narrative thread of Phil 270, when I teach it, is that philosophy can help us to understand and navigate conflict in two different but complementary ways. First, there are the methods of philosophy, which as I argued in my last post are the best ways that anyone has yet figured out to try to think through questions that are hard in the very specific sense that no one is yet sure how to answer them.

Mark Schroeder

Philosophy is Hard

The First Day of Class…

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12 days ago · 16 likes · 2 comments · Mark Schroeder

In my class, students practice some of the methods of philosophy for breaking hard questions into smaller parts, triangulating to determine what is at stake in a disagreement, offering concessions, and interpreting charitably, among others, as we work through various readings in class, and on regular “skills” assignments.

But the second important way that philosophy can hep us to understand and navigate conflict, I try to show my students, is through its content. Some of the oldest questions in philosophy, that we knew how to ask hundreds or thousands of years ago and still aren’t quite sure how to definitively answer, concern the nature of human experience - how we fit into the world, whether we have free will or are accountable for our actions, and how to live together with one another in friendship or society.

These questions have everything to do with some of the questions about conflict that are especially hard - questions like what makes conflicts personal, how to avoid breakdowns in trust, how we so easily feel disrespected or unlistened-to, and how to handle deep disagreements.

Putting these tools to work

Every student in Phil 270 gets the “opportunity” (for 25% of their course grade) to apply these tools and ideas to a real conflict in their own life. What I actually require them to do, is to apply three different tools or ideas from the course to their conflict, and I challenge them to combine these tools in novel ways that we haven’t explored yet in class.

In the first two semesters that I taught the course, students wrote about roommate troubles, bad breakups, situationships, abusive parents, and the complicated interplay between parent’s expectations of them and of their siblings, among many, many other topics. With so many rich experiences to draw on - and a rich palette of tools to apply to them, every semester there are students who combine class ideas in ways that I have never seen before, some of which blow my mind.

I can’t wait to get to know this new cohort of students tomorrow and see what they come up with.

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On the first day of every introductory undergraduate class that I teach, I offer my own definition of what unifies philosophy as a field. It is characteristic of philosophy, of course, that its practitioners feel like they have to say what it is that they do, rather than simply doing it - as well as that there is so much disagreement about exactly what this is. So any philosopher’s definition of the field has to be taken with a grain of salt. But what I offer them is this.

Philosophy is that area of human inquiry that is devoted to asking and trying to answer questions that are hard.

There is a very specific sense in which the questions of philosophy are hard - and in which all hard questions are philosophy. Philosophical questions are hard in the sense that we don’t - yet - know or agree on exactly how to go about answering them. Some questions are hard because it would take so much work to answer them, or because the experiment required to answer them requires such expensive equipment or because even to understand and ask them requires so much background knowledge. In contrast, philosophical questions live in the space between our ability to ask questions and our ability to answer them.

Ripples in the Pond

This answer to what unifies philosophy offers an answer to why so many disciplines have broken off of philosophy, from physics and biology, to psychology and computer science. Once we know and agree enough about how to go about answering certain sorts of questions, it is possible for a community of inquirers to grow up who are trained in answering those questions in those ways. Questions that were once philosophical, such as “do humans and fish have a common ancestor?” cease to be so, as we discover clear methods to answer them or how our clear methods of answering other questions can be extended to them.

When we bring into focus just how many areas of human inquiry used to be part of philosophy and now are not, it is easy to be gripped by the metaphor of a shrinking carcass from which all of the important meaty chunks are gradually being carved away, leaving nothing left but inedible bones. On this metaphorical picture, the questions remaining to philosophy in the twenty-first century are the gristle and bone that remains.

But my colleague and former teacher Scott Soames, in a 2016 Philosopher’s Stone piece, characterizes human knowledge and inquiry as instead like ripples spreading in a pond in the wake of a dropped pebble. The more that human knowledge grows, the larger the interior of the ripples - the more that is not philosophy. But at the same time, with every advance the circumference of the ripples grow as well. As he puts it, “Philosophy patrols the border, trying to understand how we got there and to conceptualize our next move. Its job is unending.”

On this picture, philosophy is growing, rather than shrinking - and it is precisely the growth in human knowledge that leaves more work for philosophy to do. This picture explains why in every serious discipline there remain questions that still “feel philosophical”. These questions push the boundaries of their disciplines in ways that practitioners don’t yet know exactly how to answer. (It also explains why some areas of philosophy can start to feel less philosophical, the more prevalent rote agreement comes to be on how to answer their questions!)

Difficulty is Everywhere

(but maybe in some places more than others)

One of the chief virtues of my answer as to what makes questions philosophical, is that is validates Soames’ spreading ripple metaphor. The bare accretion of knowledge is not enough to create new philosophical questions. But wherever it is that new knowledge enables us to ask questions that it doesn’t yet equip us to answer - those are the places where the expansion of human knowledge requires us to once more “get philosophical”.

Still, some questions may be harder to figure out how to answer than others. There could even be questions that are so easy to ask, and so hard to figure out how to answer, that we are doomed to find them philosophical for as long as there are people to ask them.

The methods of philosophy

Philosophers hone their craft trying to get leverage on these questions, even though we don’t really know or agree on exactly what will ultimately decide them. We are resourceful at finding new way to get leverage on old questions, even when that leverage is indirect and may sometimes be more suggestive than probative. We develop fine-grained skills for identifying what can’t be true, for breaking hard questions down into a larger number of smaller and slightly less hard questions, and for keeping track of complicated lines of reasoning that bridge questions together. And most of all, we cultivate patience to be able to keep returning to important questions even though we haven’t figured them out yet - so that when we come across new possible sources of leverage, we don’t forget to bring them to bear and see what they yield.

At different times in the history of philosophy, it has become trendy to identify one or another method that it has been found fruitful to bring to bear on difficult questions as the method of philosophy - either because it is going through a period of particularly fruitful applications, or for lack of any better answer to what we actually do. But none of these answers have held up to the test of time. My answer to why not is that there simply is no “the” method of philosophy. We simply do our best with whatever tools can be made to work, and the most universal of these skills are useful for tackling questions of any kind, even if they do not always give clean or easy answers.

The scope of philosophy

If this is the right picture of what philosophy is, then I think the fruits of philosophy are bound to be everywhere, because there are hard questions in every field and in every walk of life. Practice in doing philosophy is therefore one of the most important things that we can do, and one of the most practical skills that we can possibly acquire. If it is important to get the right answer to hard questions, then it is worth being patient about them in the way that philosophy requires.

Take the case of interpersonal conflict - one of my favorite test cases for the applicability of philosophy. There is no getting around the fact that conflicts are hard. I mean, some of them can be really hard. And not just hard in the sense that they take a lot of work, but hard specifically in my technical sense that it is not at all clear how to move forward within them, or even how we would decide to do so. The full skill set of thinking philosophically is simply bound, I think, to be useful in these cases. And if a relationship is important enough or hard enough to escape, or the object over which we are having the conflict is so, then it is worth the patience to exercise the skills that we can cultivate by doing philosophy.

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So I made a Substack.

They told me I should, but I had better things to do. I still do, maybe. Or maybe not, if these words find their audience in you. I’m not looking for a long-term commitment, but I do have some thoughts that I’m looking forward to exploring here. And maybe it will lead to something else, if we’re both still into it. But let’s take it as it goes.

Can philosophy be practical?

This is going to be a space for me to explore some thoughts and experiences about how to use philosophy to shed light on ordinary life - and about how attention to ordinary life can drive philosophical research, even into very abstract questions. A common theme in my musings will be the prospects for the model of “translational” research in the humanities. But I will also sometimes, in a more concrete vein, simply engage in thinking through issues that puzzle or vex me, and use whatever tools seem most helpful to me as a philosopher, in thinking about them.

Building the philosophy of conflict

The special case of connecting philosophy to life that interests me the most is the question of how philosophy can help us to understand and navigate conflict in interpersonal relationships. I’ll be introducing and exploring some of my own work in this vein, but more generally, I’m going to use this space to build my case that we need to establish and recognize the philosophy of conflict as a field of study in its own right. I believe and will argue both that philosophy needs to self-consciously contribute to the study of conflict, and also that the interdisciplinary study of conflict very much needs philosophy.

Part of my larger work of trying to build the field of the philosophy of conflict is my work directing the Conceptual Foundations of Conflict Project at USC. Periodically some of the CFCP Fellows will make guest contributions here as well.

What to expect

We’ll see how it goes, but my hope is to post here at least twice a month. I’m looking to find people to reach and connect to who fall outside of my usual social and professional circles but who share an interest in whether philosophy can matter or who can help me to bridge the gap between philosophers and the interdisciplinary study of conflict. As my eleven-year-old would say, “let’s go!”