The Rational Enquirer Issue #9

Bob Ewen, Friend of the Philosophy Department, Makes a Gift to the Department

Bob Ewen is one of our department’s great benefactors. He recently gifted to the department an endowed fund that will support our annual awards program! We caught up with him to discuss his time as a student at UW and his choice to donate to the department.

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Q1: You graduated with a major in philosophy from our department in 1971. What was it like being a student in our department then?

A: I arrived at UWaterloo in 1966, right at the post-war economic peak; the bottom was in 1982. We sympathized with the U.S. civil rights movement and were concerned about smog, garbage, and water pollution (all now greatly improved). Vietnam was our major influence, driving unrest, attitudes (including cynicism), and music. UWaterloo had a small but vocal ‘radical student movement’ such that the U.S. press labelled us “The Red University.”

From grades one to thirteen, boomer class sizes were forty-two, same as at UWaterloo. The boomer bulge required many professors but Canada had not produced them; so we imported them. The attitudes of these professors reflected unhappiness with ‘conservative U.S. politics’ and Vietnam. The Department of Philosophy had two Canadian professors out of twenty. This was an issue in all departments. In my first two years, the PAC, Student Center, Engineering 101, and the Mathematics, Chemistry, Psychology, and Humanities buildings were under construction. We walked on slippery plywood to crowded lecture halls and classrooms. Boomers had not seen anything different and so we were happy. By 1968, the campus was completed and landscaped.

Portrait photograph of Bob Ewen 

The male-female ratios were at UWaterloo 7:1 and at Laurier 4:1. In 1966, there were four first-year women engineers. UWaterloo had no alumnae when I attended, as (small) graduating classes began in 1962/63.

UWaterloo was considered number one in engineering and mathematics. Were we in the Faculty of Arts intimidated? No! We were proud of these faculties and were determined to make our own mark. It did not take long; by 1969 we arguably had the best psychology and philosophy departments in Canada.

I was happy with most of my courses in philosophy and in arts more broadly. I had four credits from engineering, and so I took twenty courses in three years for my honours degree (most degrees took eighteen after the first year). Those four credits meant I did not take sociology, history, or a second course in political science, cultural anthropology, or English. Upon graduation I was unhappy about this. My heavy philosophy load allowed no room for ‘extra’ courses.

The professors included two existentialists, a Hegelian, a pre-Socratic philosophy & Plato expert, a historian of philosophy, a logician, and several analytical philosophers. I always have been proud of my philosophy degree, more so than of my Rotman M.B.A. I earned it with dedication and direction from dedicated professors and teaching assistants. Many of my classmates did not graduate. They were unable to do some of the courses or unable to handle the workload. I was empathic; it was not easy.

To commemorate the 50th anniversary of my philosophy B.A. with honours, next April I will read my honours thesis on “Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind.” It is 40,000 words (there was no word processing then!), and I have not looked at it since handing it to Professor Leslie Armour in April 1971.

Q2: How has studying philosophy informed your life and career?

A: Studying Philosophy revealed how I think; studying business (MBA) how my competitors think. Within is my evolving process which utilizes this gap.” – Bob Ewen’s former website.

To me: “People are people in the business of being people” (from analyst Ian Notley) is a key truth. Understand this, and life in a way gets easy; otherwise life is frustrating. Forty honours courses reveal deep, but often unrecognized, human truths. The courses’ contents and the teachers’ presentations supplemented by our classmates’ input highlight these revelations. Our majors are a source of knowledge and become ‘personal prisms’ focusing our diversified learning into a meaningful synthesis. For example, Empedocles’ cosmology discussed the forces of Love and Strife. To me, these principles represent meta-cycles, reflecting human mass psychology, such as inflation and deflation in economics.

People fascinate me; understanding them has been a delightful journey. Philosophy’s prism was instrumental in this understanding, allowing me to ‘self-actualize’ as suggested by the quote above.

Q3: Thank You for your generous gift of an endowed fund that will support the department’s annual awards program. What inspired you to give back to UWaterloo and the Philosophy Department more specifically?

A: Maslow’s hierarchy of needs implies that, if we self-actualize (or become ‘successful’) and transcend, we shed our egos and evolve from wanting ’things’ to seeking holistic levels. These nourish generosity.

Part-time jobs were critical for some students and illness caused financial stress. In 1970, if the department had available $1,000, a student temporarily unable to work could be ‘covered off’ by $200 from the Department. In 2008, I decided to contribute annually the current value of 1970’s $1,000 without conditions.

In 2010, Tim Kenyon, then chair of the department, sent a letter stating that my donations were the first the Department of Philosophy had received and that the department had struggled to find an optimal use. The result was the Annual Philosophy Awards. After funding the awards for twelve years, I marvelled at the results and emerging long-term positives.

I concluded that the awards should be endowed, as permanence encourages exponential growth and benefits.

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Life after Graduation: Q & A with Chris Grisdale

Chris Grisdale graduated twice from our department! He received his B.A. (with honours) in 2008 and his Master’s in 2010. He recently returned to Toronto to practice union-side labour law after two years of practicing commercial litigation in Vancouver. Before that he clerked for a group of judges at the B.C. Supreme Court where he worked on a range of matters. Here he shares the significance of philosophy to him and his work.

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Q1: What is your favourite memory studying philosophy?

A: I can’t point my finger on a single memory, but I was fortunate to have a philosophy professor take a special interest in my success. She was always generous with me both academically and more generally. I’m a clearer thinker and better writer because of her, but you can’t discount the general support she gave me. It was confidence building.

Q2: How does philosophy inform your work as a lawyer?

A: It’s cliché but there’s overlap between a philosophical style of thinking and legal thinking. Some of the better philosophy courses taught me how to be critical and analytically rigorous. Those are important skills for law school and litigation.

Portrait of Chris Grisdale 

Q3: You've written op-eds for the Toronto Star and The Globe and Mail.  What is one of the most pressing issues, relevant to philosophy and law, that we see today?

A: The B.C. Supreme Court recently heard closing arguments in Cambie Surgeries Corporation v British Columbia (Attorney General). In that case the plaintiff challenged the constitutionality of certain provisions in provincial legislation that prohibit the operation of private medical clinics. If the plaintiff is successful, we might see private and public health care in Canada. For ethicists thinking about the allocation of scarce resources and equal access to basic goods, this case could be worth watching.

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Prof. Katy Fulfer’s Sabbatical at the Hannah Arendt Center

This past fall, Prof. Fulfer spent her sabbatical at Bard College’s Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities. We caught up with her to find out more about her time at the Center and how it has impacted her work.

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Q1: Welcome back from sabbatical! What’s it like at the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College, and why did you spend your sabbatical there?

A: The Arendt Center’s mission is to lead, in their words, “bold and risky humanities thinking.” This is the kind of thinking Arendt herself took up in her own writing. The Center’s primary mission is to engage in meaningful dialogue about current political issues. I see them as an exemplar for how to do public scholarship well. I thought I could learn much from them to develop my capacities for public scholarship.

In addition, one of their premier annual events is a conference, with prominent public intellectuals and scholars. In 2019, the conference was on “Racism and Anti-Semitism.” Since I’m working on Arendt’s thought and refugee resettlement, I had this time off teaching, and I’ve wanted to go to their conference for many years, the Arendt Center seemed like a good place to spend three months in the fall. Plus, who can say ‘no’ to the Hudson Valley region of New York as the leaves change? I wish I would have rented a bicycle!

Most of my time I spent on my own, working in the library, but I also enjoyed conversations with Center faculty and other fellows, and I sat in on a seminar on Arendt’s Life of the Mind. The course was working through a draft of a forthcoming annotated edition of Arendt’s last book, which many people consider to be her most philosophical. Participating was a real treat! I also had wonderful conversations with students about their senior research projects on Arendt.

Being on sabbatical also gave me a chance to recharge. I spent a good amount of time hiking, visiting historic homes, and attending cultural events, including experimental ballets, musicals, and author readings.

Q2: With the Arendt Center’s attention to public engagement with philosophy, what practices did you see in place there and how can they inspire how we do philosophy?

A: I thought I would leave my sabbatical with a list of ideas to try out, but instead my time at the Hannah Arendt Center has made me think about how to go about doing public scholarship. My training in philosophy has made me fairly comfortable with disagreement and opposing points of view. At the Racism and Anti-Semitism conference, I disagreed with many speakers! With a line-up as diverse as Dr. Ibram X. Kendi, Dr. John H. McWhorter, and Thomas Chatteron Williams addressing questions of blackness and racism, disagreement comes almost naturally. I was surprised, however, to find myself made uncomfortable by several talks. I thought to myself, “I would never have invited this person to campus,” which made me think, what do I value when I say I want to have a difficult dialogue? When I invite speakers, why am I inviting them? Why do I value giving these particular people a platform? How do I prepare participants—students or the public—to engage with polemical ideas?

It takes so much work to pull off everything the Arendt Center does. I was impressed by Bard as an institution that values public scholarship. Much of what the Center produces—their weekly newsletter, Amor Mundi, and their virtual reading group—are significant feats! This mode of scholarship is valued and supported by the college. I am thankful that our department also values public engagement, but my general sense is that philosophy as a profession and the universities as institutions usually privilege the scholarship we produce for other scholars above public engagement. This practice can be a disincentive for scholars to take up this kind of work.

I was also inspired by my Bard colleagues to do more public-facing work with my students. After watching Thomas Chatteron Williams, a cultural critic and author, host a conversation with his students about their work on racial identity, I was inspired to do something similar with my course on home and belonging in Arendt’s thought that I taught this winter. Unfortunately the COVID-19 pandemic forced us to cancel that assignment!

As a side note, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the Arendt Center is opening up its virtual reading group to all members of the public for free. You can learn more about the reading group at hac.bard.edu.

Q3: What projects are you working on now, especially related to Arendt's philosophy?

A: The big picture for my research is a book project, co-authored with Dr. Rita A. Gardiner. We aim to offer an intersectional feminist interpretation of Hannah Arendt’s critique of the family that enables us to explore conceptions of home and political belonging. By ‘intersectional’ we mean that we are interested in how gender and sexuality—commonly referred to when discussing family—are not considered in isolation, but rather shaped by experiences of racialization, class, and other axes of identity.

Arendt was often harsh about the family as a model of political belonging. I used this critique in my sabbatical research to discuss how family is used as a metaphor for belonging in the discourse around Canada’s Private Sponsorship of Refugees program. I was critical of these metaphors and argued that they lead us to a limited notion of freedom and belonging.

At the moment Rita and I are working on Arendt’s essay on the socialist revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg, who is one of two women Arendt features in her collection of essays, Men in Dark Times. (The other is Isak Dinesen, the pen name for Karen Blixen). In her essay on Luxemburg, Arendt seems to portray the political potential of family and family-like relationships more positively. We’re delving into this ambiguity. I'm also working on a paper with Janet Jones—a Ph.D. student in Applied Philosophy and an R.A. on my research grant—on storytelling, narrative agency, and solidarity. We use Arendt’s critique of empathy to complicate discussions about what it means to engage in empathetic, solidaristic listening.

>Prof. Katy Fulfer (left) with Rita Gardener (right)