Timothy Stock

Timothy Stock is a professor and chair of the department of philosophy at Salisbury University, and he is currently a member of the governing board of the Public Philosophy Network. 

What type public philosophy do you do?

I am most interested in doing public philosophy that engages as diverse a range of people as possible into the process of doing philosophy itself. Not simply finding new venues or forums for academics, but rather for the public to be the basis and subject of philosophical inquiry. REACH (“Re-envisioning Ethics Access and Community Humanities”) is an example where a group of us are trying to forge a new path, what we’ve come to call philosophical enfranchisement. This focus on enfranchisement means an increased emphasis on “listening first” and trying to locate people where they are. It also means that philosophy is less about having the better argument, and more about understanding who is and is not included in a given field of inquiry.

Taken from the perspective of my home department (which in my role as chair is the focus of my public philosophy activity) this means identifying a range of social enterprises and activities to be enriched with voices (such as prisoners, school children, or religious leaders) who are not typically enfranchised in philosophy. It is also program-level initiatives such as our Eastern Correctional Institution book discussion program, Ethics Bowl, Philosophy in Schools, and REACH that can sustain grants or more ambitious multi-year projects. We’ve just revised our departmental reporting so that each of these levels of activity can anchor our teaching and research in a way that is of obvious civic interest to our campus leadership, our colleagues in other departments, and to the public at large.

Give an example of a successful project. 

One of the most interesting projects I have been a part of is the REACH initiative, which has been active since 2018. I received an NEH “Connections” planning grant in collaboration with my colleague Dr. Michéle Schlehofer in the SU Psychology Department, who specializes in community-based research. She and I conducted a year’s worth of activities, the centerpiece of which was creating an ethics network in the local community which served as the basis for conducting regular “listening sessions” or focus groups around ethics. This would be considered a descriptive ethics project in that we focused on clarifying and understanding the meaning of fundamental ethical concepts (justice, equity, etc.) as articulated by our community partners, and then we also sought to gain a sense of what community leaders would describe as the priority areas of ethical concern in the greater Salisbury region. We were able to take these sessions and convert them into a range of materials, including Ethics-Bowl–style cases that captured actual decisions that people in our community have had to make, as well as newsletters and a white paper on the ethics of using criminal background checks for housing applications. The cases that we generate out of these sessions provide the basis for classroom work: Perhaps predictably we had a lot of discussion of community health ethics and vaccinations in our sessions last year, and we’ve been able to discuss those cases in courses offered by the SU Biology department such as Immunology or in introductory courses to our STEM majors.

What motivates you to do this work?

I suppose my core motivation is a love of philosophy, but perhaps also a sense that philosophy is needful in our communities right now. My sensibility about philosophy is very interdisciplinary and, for lack of a better term, “bottom up.” I think we must do a better job of enfranchising people beyond the protreptics we engage in in freshman classrooms. In this I have been tremendously inspired by colleagues like Claire Katz and Cristina Cammarano who work with children and young adults—this is serious work and should be normalized, because learning to communicate about concepts and ideals in the context of public philosophy improves the degree of clarity that we can have in regards to our own interests and questions. 

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

It has taken me years to understand this, and perhaps I am only now just doing so fully. My abiding interest has been in existential and phenomenological philosophy. The opportunity to observe people in our REACH listening sessions with an eye to the way in which concepts are phenomenologically founded, and thinking of concepts such as responsibility for others and freedom (such as one would find in, say, Levinas or de Beauvoir) has led me to believe that philosophers can be particularly attentive to how the unfolding of a conversation itself is a kind of philosophical text. I have realized that the act of people describing or wrestling with fundamental concepts and their meaning can have tremendous drama, precisely because it allows us to understand when something is “at issue” for us personally, normatively, or politically. So I’m also interested in the possibilities of staging and translating philosophical conversations to different audiences. I’ve taught philosophy of religion and theology by reading through transcripts of interviews with religious practitioners with my students, or by tackling dramatic pieces such as Will Arbery’s Heroes of the Fourth Turning and its sensitivity to the tensions in Anglo-American style conservative intellectualism, or even Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother with its many deep dives into psychoanalytic theory. I’ve gone so far as to write a graphic novel script and writing for cartoons to get at some of these things as well. I suppose in all of this I’m staying true to or re-articulating what Kierkegaard called “experimentation” by which he meant exploring fully a possible viewpoint as an almost dramatically instantiated person or voice.

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

My teaching has been enriched by this to a tremendous degree. I have taught by having my students facilitate discussion on course readings with prisoners (as I do in my “Existentialism” classes) and have also staged public debates (as in my “Problem of God” class). The most current examples have been the ethics “drop in” sessions that I have done in a range of classes across campus, in the social sciences and physical sciences. There is something important that happens when you make a class responsible for articulating a present community concern. It cuts through the navel-gazing, for one, or the stereotypical dude in the back of class who needs to STFU. Disagreements matter more. Listening and understanding has a premium. And I find that you can get a lot more out of people than you think you can. About my community work, the prison group, or work with students with atypical preparation for philosophy, I get questions in the shape of: “How do you get these people to start doing rigorous philosophical work?” I think this question reveals unhelpful exclusivism and elitism about what philosophy actually refers to, which is very much already in the real world. What if it were professional philosophers who needed to bend their ears to hear others? This is what I take to be the point of work such as Miranda Fricker’s Epistemic Injustice and the subfield of literature it has generated, or Jill Stauffer’s Ethical Loneliness—that it takes work to listen to the conceptual gaps that are already implied by what we take philosophy to be “already,” before we have talked to anyone beyond the profession, or thought about whether that profession is accessible to all people, or before we have thought critically about how we frame philosophical dialogue in advance.

How does your department or institution support your public philosophy? How would you like to see them support you?

I have become a bit of an evangelist for thinking very seriously about departmental review criteria, whether that means tenure and promotion, or annual progress reviews, or even long-term assessments. All the activities of a philosophy department can be seriously enhanced by prioritizing public and community philosophy programming and initiatives. A lot of philosophers, and a lot of humanities scholars broadly, are wary of assessments, learning outcomes, etc., because they sound like the sort of thing we’d love to use as a punching bag in an epistemology class, and they are in no ways a real representation of learning or “philosophy” proper, any more than a treasure map should be taken to be an indication of distance or topography. But what public philosophy assessment and other review criteria allow you to do is to allow, say, a tenure candidate to frame their work critically in terms of identifying new constituencies for philosophy itself, whether that is accessing a more diverse student population or addressing an area of public debate that is underserved by philosophers at present. 

I am fortunate to work at a university that has civic engagement as a primary goal and a central part of its mission, and a department that reflects that at all levels. And you can see that reflected in our community as well—the average person around town is pretty well aware of our department through our myriad activities, and you don’t get as much this glazed-over look of asking what it is we do with our time. By incorporating public philosophy into our self-assessment, we always have a working road map of how to access the community with the work we do—and even if it isn’t a real measure of what philosophical education “is” in every conceivable way, it sustains a conversation within the department to allow us to frame and re-frame what we do and its public justification. At a time when we are all getting tired of hearing about the perennial crisis in the humanities (which is really a reflection of a funding crisis and a crisis of confidence for which the decline of the humanities is merely a symptom), I feel that the best way forward is to continually ask ourselves how clearly we can represent our activities and interests such that what we do is understood and communicated.

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

I think that one of the most shocking encounters I have had in my adult life is realizing how many aspects of our political and civil society are completely isolated from any sort of review or revision. That could be the way that a hospital allocates resources, or what happens to prisoners decades after their conviction, or how that conviction happens in the first place. There is just a tremendous amount of what Jill Stauffer taught me to call “ethical loneliness”, that is, harms caused to individuals because they are a part of systems that cannot really be explained or accessed from the outside. Philosophers, I think, can be particularly good at re-opening foundational senses of what these institutions are for, what they think they know about what they do, or what they know but what they restrict from scrutiny in what Charles Mills calls “epistemological ignorance.” There is a great deal to be done in making sure public debates about what ought to happen are premised on knowing how decisions are made and by whom, understanding who is enfranchised within a given social world and who is not. So there is a justice in hearing people and finding ways that addressing the isolation and harm they have experienced can be transformed into institutional revision and repair.

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