Engaged Philosophy and the Public Philosophy Network are partnering to present a special interview series that highlights the work of public philosophers who will be presenting at the 2019 PPN Conference Oct 17-19, 2019.
Zachary Piso is an assistant professor in the department of philosophy at the University of Dayton. His work connects him with grocers, farmers, scientists, students, philosophers and more—and he helps connect them, by analyzing values and uncovering shared priorities.
What type(s) of public philosophy do you do?
Public philosophy for me involves engaging stakeholders to environmental, agricultural, and food justice challenges in my local community. For example, Lansing, MI and Dayton, OH are working to create more inclusive and sustainable food systems by producing food on urban farms and community gardens, and by distributing food through cooperative grocers and farmers markets. These endeavors weave together diverse values, and as a public philosopher, I see my role as facilitating communication across different stakeholder communities through careful analysis of the concepts, practices, and values of these various participants.
Give an example of a successful project.
When first getting involved in food justice work, my research team (Ian Werkheiser, Samantha Noll, and Christina Leshko) charted the values articulated during several farmer workshops at which we discussed what sustainability means over dinner and Michigan-produced libations. We developed an academic piece in Environmental Values, and a white paper for researchers at our Long-term Ecological Research Station to help agricultural scientists understand the needs and constraints of smallholders who had felt neglected by the land grant university.
Presently, I’m collaborating with a group led by Lissy Goralnik at Michigan State University to work with urban growers to co-produce a resilience plan for agriculture in Lansing, MI. One of the neat “discoveries” early on in this project was the ways that stakeholders’ values hinged on their view of governance—in short, stakeholders emphasized different values (safety versus community building, or sustainability versus economic growth) depending on how, procedurally, they felt decisions about the food system should be made. This relationship between agricultural values and expectations for governance may help to locate common ground among otherwise disparate priorities.
What benefits does doing public philosophy offer to the public(s) you engage? What benefits does it offer you?
As much as I can, I try to stay pretty practical with these public philosophical engagements—I see conceptual analysis, especially analysis of the values underlying our norms and discursive practices, as helping us understand one another and co-construct shared priorities and projects. My hope is that scientists especially will understand the values of stakeholders to their research and develop research questions that are more accountable to diverse publics. This is work that community-engaged social scientists do regularly, and while it’s vital to learn methods and methodologies from those fields, I do think philosophers are especially sensitive to the subtleties of ordinary language.
As far as personal benefits, I’m fortunate enough to be in a department that hired me to do this sort of philosophy and to teach my students how to do this sort of philosophy. I’ve also found that this work opens doors to communities where philosophers can do a lot of good. I should also mention that public philosophy is in my experience much more collaborative than traditional approaches, and I’m much happier working in collaborations than going it alone.
What role does the PPN play in your philosophical work? What role do you play in the PPN?
Most importantly, it has connected me with a community of philosophers who are wonderful interlocutors and who have spent a lot of time reflecting on similar practical and intellectual questions. The people I’ve met at PPN conferences are incredible scholars and I relish crossing paths with them at other environmental philosophy and philosophy of science gatherings. I’ve been a bit more involved with the Public Philosophy Journal—there’s a lot of overlap in the membership to the two projects—for which, along with Gretel Van Wieren, I recently edited a special issue on “The New Ethics of Food.” And I’m looking forward to co-organizing a session at the Summer Institute in American Philosophy with Nancy McHugh and Danielle Lake on the praxis of public philosophy to help support the next wave of public philosophers.
In what ways does public philosophy inform your teaching (or vice-versa)?
I’m in a pretty great position where a lot of my teaching includes capstone sustainability curricula that integrates philosophy with methods training in environmental science. These courses invite students to work on teams to develop projects that improve sustainability on campus or in the local community. I think philosophy in these projects must be deeply contextual, and public philosophy cultivates the skills and sensitivities to do justice to the diversity of values embedded in particular places. All the ethical theories in the world can’t guide you if you can’t locate in the lived experience of community members the values and ideals that these theories help us to organize. So when my students set out to promote reusable to-go containers, mitigate stormwater runoff, or restore urban greenspaces, I think it’s public philosophical skills that help them ensure that these projects are accountable to their stakeholders, both human and non-human.
What’s the philosophical grounding of your public philosophy?
Some combination of pragmatism, feminism, and ordinary language philosophy. I was brought up in the discipline as a Deweyan, and his pragmatist philosophy provides a nice architectonic for what philosophy is and how it is integral to democratic deliberation. But the specific praxis of public philosophy is much better articulated (compared to Dewey, everything is much better articulated) in feminist pragmatism and feminist philosophy of science. And I owe some of my focus on public discourse to ordinary language philosophy, Wittgenstein, and neopragmatism’s peculiar appropriation of each. Since I occasionally need to write methods sections for science journals, it’s the ordinary language philosophers self-understanding that seems to best explain how I do what I purport to do.
If someone wanted to do public philosophy like yours, what steps or resources would you recommend?
Collaborate with qualitative and mixed-methods social scientists, and learn how researchers doing community-engaged, participatory, and place-based research are approaching instrument design, interviewing, discourse analysis, and other methods. Please don’t try to reinvent the wheel when it comes to social science methods. Philosophers have a lot to offer when it comes to interpreting qualitative data, and a lot to offer when it comes to designing research protocols that ask and answer neglected normative and conceptual questions. But unless we situate what we do within (and sometimes against) the empirical methods that brilliant sociologists, anthropologists, and others have developed, we fail to validate our claims or appropriately distinguish them from the empirical generalizations that these fields are in a better position to support.
In my sort of public philosophy, it helps to spend more time than may be healthy stewing over metaphilosophical and metaethical questions. It wouldn’t be a conference if I wasn’t asked about Hume’s is/ought distinction, for instance, so it’s professionally vital to work out the relationships between descriptive and normative discourse. Public philosophers’ interest in dissolving some of these dichotomies confronts institutions deeply invested in maintaining them, and so rehearsing arguments for how what we do is philosophy—as aggravating as that can sometimes be—has proven worthwhile. Every tradition has their Wittgenstein showing the incoherence of these dualisms, so it’s helped being a pluralist happy to answer to the positivist or the poststructuralist.
EngagedPhilosophy readers: If you’d like to nominate yourself or someone else for an interview, email us at info@engagedphilosophy.com.
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