Ian Olasov

Ian Olasov is a philosophy graduate student at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His research centers on moral discourse, which he spreads through the Brooklyn Public Philosophers talk series, The Owl podcast, and Ask a Philosopher booths in public spaces.

 

 

 

1. What type(s) of public philosophy work do you do?

First of all: thank you so much for inviting me to do this interview! I’m a big fan.

Most of the public philosophy work I do is through Brooklyn Public Philosophers (BKPP), a philosophical forum/event series for a general audience that I started in 2013 with the help of the Brooklyn Public Library. We run a monthly speaker series during the school year. We have a podcast, The Owl, where Sophie Murphy, a recent graduate of Trinity College Dublin, and I talk with philosophers about their research and about listener-submitted questions. We’ve also launched a series of Ask a Philosopher booths at different places around the city—greenmarkets, retail spaces, street fairs, and so on. I hang out with a handful of philosophers and we talk with visitors about their philosophical questions and pose questions of our own.

 

2. Give an example of a successful project.

The Ask a Philosopher booths have been super gratifying. When the booth is really humming, you get to make these intense, intimate, unpredictable, sort of sweetly ephemeral connections with complete strangers. There are a lot of great moments—you introduce someone to an idea that has been very important to you, or you see someone realize that their own weird private puzzle is a question philosophers have taken seriously for a long time.

Less selfishly, I think the booth has had some real impact. We’ve shown people how philosophy can help them think about the questions they care about. We’ve turned people on to resources for self-study. And the project has advanced some grander (more grandiose?) goals in less perceptible ways. I think we’ve modeled, and hopefully spread, the norms of thought and discourse that make good philosophical conversations work, and that enable philosophers, at their best, to reason with each other across deep disagreement. We’ve brought a bit of positive PR to the philosophical community. And we’ve contributed, in a small way, to a larger ongoing effort to change the incentive structure of the discipline, so that public work is rewarded professionally.

 

3. What motivates you to do this work?

I care about the impacts I just described, but also it’s just so much fun. In a lot of scholarly work, the questions that get people into philosophy in the first place, the cosmic or practical or otherwise already interesting questions, often drop out of sight. And that’s fine—not everything that philosophers do needs to address those questions. But when you’re working with a general audience, you really have to make the connections between those questions and the discussion at hand very vivid. That’s a fun skill to exercise. Also—and this is maybe more of a personal answer than you were looking for—there are some institutional settings in philosophy where I feel at home, and others that, for whatever reason, make me deeply, viscerally uncomfortable. BKPP feels very home-y to me.

 

4. In what ways does the work inform your research (or vice-versa)?

It’s made me more vigilant. I’m quicker to recognize the philosophical dimensions of public discussions, and I’m sort of perpetually primed to identify tools from philosophy that can further those discussions. This has led to a few pieces for a general audience that I’m proud of. You can find them here, here, and here.

 

5. In what ways does the work inform your teaching (or vice-versa)?

Honestly, not very much. I do regard teaching as a sort of public philosophy, but classrooms are different from the sorts of settings that BKPP works with in some important ways. You have a group of students who meet regularly throughout a semester for a whole class period, they’re more prepared, they can write, they can split into small groups, they can play games, and so on.

 

6. If someone wanted to take on public philosophy work like yours, what steps or resources would you recommend?

Working with the Brooklyn Public Library has been great. They’ve provided logistical support, space, advertising, and suggestions for event formats, and I have all of the creative control I could want over the philosophical content. So I would recommend partnering with an institution that comes with its own audience and can help promote events.

Also, the Ask a Philosopher booth is pretty easy to set up. All you need is a couple of reasonably friendly philosophers, a location with a healthy amount of foot traffic, a table, and a sign saying what you’re up to. We also set out a bowl of thought experiments, a bowl of philosophical questions, and a bowl of candy. I would love to see philosophers elsewhere run with this sort of idea.

 

7. What failure have you experienced doing public philosophy, and how did it teach you as you moved forward?

We’ve had a couple of purely logistical failures – events at the wrong time or place for the audience. The lessons are obvious enough: make the time and space convenient for your audience.

We also had a couple of election-related events in late October and early November—a kind of fourth presidential debate that dealt with the philosophical questions facing the country at the moment, and a pair of short, back-to-back talks about voting. To be clear, I wouldn’t describe them as failures; philosophically, they were very rich, and an average-sized crowd showed up to them. I was expecting the crowds to be much bigger, though. I chalked it up to Trump fatigue. Trump and the political currents that swept him into the White House have made a lot of philosophical questions—questions of political economy, moral psychology, social epistemology, applied philosophy of language—much more salient than they were a couple of years ago, and there is a strong urge to peg every piece of public philosophy to the man somehow. But public interest in Trump and in national politics is bound to wax and wane over the next four years. The lesson: know your audience, and know how much Trump is too much.

 

8. To what larger justice issues do you connect your public philosophy?

My goal with the series has been to make it roughly half social and political philosophy and half everything else. With the social and political philosophy, the connection to justice is clear.

With the other material, the connection to social justice is a bit more indirect, but is still very real. Public reason is in a sorry state in the U.S. today, in large part because of our inability to manage disagreement. Philosophers have a lot of practice reasoning across fundamental disagreement. We ought to do what we can to foster the norms of discourse that make that sort of reasoning possible.

Lastly, this is more parochial, but I do think philosophy’s own demographic problems are matters of justice. I try to use BKPP to make non-male, non-white philosophers more visible to the public. I don’t know whether this is a reflection of the philosophers’ own demography or something else, but the BKPP audience itself has grown to be very diverse. It looks like Brooklyn.

 

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