Another Way at the Problem

This time last year I was dealing with the problem of not knowing where to go in the storied discipline in which I work. I was thinking analytic epistemology was maybe a good idea, but I wasn't sure - and to be honest, I wasn't internally committed to the idea. Something just didn't feel right about it. This uncertainty stinks, especially if you are remotely considering applying to a PhD program.

Over the last year, though, things have revealed themselves very slowly. It's only just now that I've stumbled upon a philosophical question that is interesting, fruitful, and somehow is not a total stumper (there are a lot of those in philosophy). I'm spending some time on the problem of interaction, roughly the question "How do we know there are other selves?" My independent study is focused on this question, and the way it is resolved by phenomenology (Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger). It's important, I think, that the problem is usually couched as "How do we know there are other minds?" because phenomenology is in part an attempt to recover the whole self from the mind-body problem. Even in modern philosophy, though, this question has interesting resolutions (or attempts, in particular Leibniz's shot at it is fascinating). Merleau-Ponty resolved it pretty convincingly for me last semester, but I'm working deeper with his ideas this summer.

This question has consequences for how we behave toward those others we've discovered, so there's an important way in which this question is directed toward ethics. It is also a convenient study to be doing this summer, because in the fall I'm breaking from philosophy and taking a film studies course on "Film as History." I have designs on a paper about the problem I'm studying right now and The Lives of Others, which is a movie stinking with philosophical problems. It's also an amazing film.

Part of the good thing about going back to UC-D is that I've remembered I'm the most comfortable when I'm thinking in an interdisciplinary way, and continental philosophy is (at least for me) more congenial to this pursuit. When I told her this, my undergraduate advisor said "I told you so." She's been telling me this for years.