Issue 10 | Fall 2020
A new state of being: department update
Philosophy and the pandemic: Q&A with Dr. Mathieu Doucet and Dr. Jennifer Saul
A new state of being: department update
Welcome to the tenth edition of The Rational Enquirer, the Department of Philosophy's alumni newsletter.
Life in the philosophy department has changed dramatically. During the pandemic we have learned new, and often challenging, ways of communicating, teaching, and staying connected while keeping our students motivated and supported. Instructors in the department have been teaching remotely during the spring and fall terms, and plan to continue into the new year.
This fall we are offering two pandemic related courses at both the undergraduate, and graduate level. Dr. Mathieu Doucet is teaching an undergraduate course on “Pandemic Ethics” and Dr. Jenny Saul is teaching a graduate/undergraduate seminar on “Pandemic Philosophy.” We sat down with both professors to talk about their reflections on what it's like to teach a topic that is evolving day-by-day and what their students are talking about.
The most regrettable aspect of the current situation is the loss of our in-person events. Many of you joined us for scholarly talks and important celebrations over the years staying connected to the department, faculty and staff. We may offer some virtual events in the coming months as conditions become more settled. We hope you can join us either virtually or in-person in the near future.
Goodbye to Shannon Dea
From 2007-2020, Shannon Dea was absolutely central to life at not just the Philosophy Department, but also the University -- she served as Vice President of FAUW, Director of Women’s Studies, Teaching Fellow, and Associate Chair for both Graduates and Undergraduates.
Among many honours, she is the winner of the Distinguished Teacher Award, the University of Waterloo’s highest award for teaching excellence, the University of Waterloo Faculty of Arts Excellence in Teaching Award, the University of Waterloo Faculty of Arts Excellence in Service Award, and the Canadian Philosophical Association essay prize for best paper by a tenured professor.
She created and sustained many important campus initiatives including the W3 (Waterloo Women’s Wednesdays) which organizes events for women-identified and non-binary colleagues to get together and share research, the University of Waterloo 16 Days of Action on Gender-Based Violence campaign, and the Indigenization Working Group of the Faculty Association of the University of Waterloo.
Among many articles and other publications, she is the author of the acclaimed book Beyond The Binary: Thinking about Sex and Gender. Sadly for us, but excitingly for Saskatchewan, she has now moved on to a post as Dean of Arts at the University of Regina.
Due to COVID, Shannon’s send off(s) had to be either virtual or socially distanced. Beloved by many groups of people, she did a lot of both! People showed up in front of her house on multiple occasions.
The department gave her a Zoom going-away party online. The tributes flowed in from all across the university, and this excerpt from former philosophy chair Dave DeVidi captures the spirit well.
"It has now come to the point where I’ve been in the Philosophy Department longer than anyone, which means that I have known and worked with Shannon as long as anyone at Waterloo. I’ve therefore had a chance to talk to many people about her over several years, and there’s a remarkable pattern in these conversations: people always seem to reach for the same phrase to describe her. “Shannon,” people say, “is a force of nature.”
If you’re not ready for her, first encounters with Shannon can be quite shocking. If it’s a conversation, you might not be ready to shift gears and cover so many topics so fast, nor to laugh quite so hard. If it’s a Senate meeting you might find yourself wondering whether you’ve ever seen anyone arrive quite so well-prepared, and asking the person next to you, “Is she really going to ask that pointed question in public?” If you’re a colleague or student in distress and someone has sent you to talk to Shannon, you might wonder when you’ve ever met such an empathetic person. In almost any first encounter, Shannon can bowl you over. Sometimes it takes people some time to overcome their initial shock. When they do, they see that all of it — all the energy and activity — is generated in a heart that is a fascinating mix of compassion, justice seeking, curiosity and looking for fun, and all of those instincts are put into some sort of order by as sharp an intellect as you’ll find anywhere. If you know anyone (other than a right wing troll on Twitter) who wants to say something bad about Shannon Dea, my bet is it’s because they haven’t had a chance to spend more than a few minutes with her…
Shannon is unique. Wherever she is gets better because she’s there. Well done University of Regina for seeing what was in front of you."
We wish Dean Dea extremely well on her new adventures, and hope she’ll come back to visit often. We will miss her.
Philosophy and the Pandemic: Q&A with Dr. Jennifer Saul and Dr. Mathieu Doucet
Dr. Jennifer Saul is teaching PHIL 471: Pandemic Philosophy. The course explores a variety of issues related to pandemics, across several areas of philosophy including scientific modelling, pandemic communication, contagion and prejudice, justice in pandemic conditions, conspiracy theories, public health and human rights, surveillance, expert consensus, research ethics, polarization, and disability issues.
Q1: The coronavirus pandemic has forced us to confront questions of meaning, purpose, and even truth. How do you see philosophy as helping us answer these questions?
A: Well, all these questions are philosophical questions. But of course I always tend to think that philosophy is better at asking questions than answering them! Much of what we are doing on the course is figuring out what questions to ask, and how to ask them, and finding connections between the questions. I find all of that very significant, so I'm really enjoying it.
Q2: Do you see the pandemic as a catalyst for long term change?
A: This was one of the first questions we discussed, and students were quite divided. Some felt that life would be forever different-- both physically, in terms of interactions with other people; and psychologically, as people's priorities would never go back to the pre-pandemic ones. Some of the changes anticipated were awful-- decimated economies, lost years of people's lives. But others were visionary-- new appreciation for essential workers, a better safety net, less concern for material things. Other students, though, pointed out how thoroughly everyone managed to forget the Flu Pandemic, and anticipated that we would do the same with this as soon as possible- for better or worse. Me? I have no idea at all and will wait and see.
Q3: What are the top issues that students are asking about in your class?
A: So far, we've been discussing the way that various inequalities (race, gender, disability) play out in the pandemic, and we keep coming back to the question of whether the pandemic is doing anything new or just revealing, especially starkly, what was already there. Another recurrent issue is what our responsibilities are as individuals, especially toward people who we think are behaving irresponsibly. We also keep coming back to what sorts of systematic structures have helped or hindered the fight against the pandemic.
Q4: How do you teach a topic that is rapidly changing, sometimes day to day?
A: Once key thing has been to build in flexibility from the start. I have left the readings unspecified for two weeks so that we can respond to events as they unfold (as well as to student interests). I’ve made a point of noting that the syllabus may change as new readings come out and new events occur. I’ve also been a great deal more flexible in my thinking about what to read. I’ve always been a fairly traditional teacher, assigning academic articles and books. But for this class, many of the readings are short blog posts and news articles. It’s strange having a syllabus where almost everything was written in 2020, but it’s also quite exciting to be discussing everything as it happens. I’ve also built flexibility into the structure of discussions. One discussion for each week will be on the week's assigned readings, but the other discussion is on whatever students want to discuss. This one is often about the most recent COVID-related news, but it always turns philosophical.
Dr. Mathieu Doucet is teaching PHIL 371: Pandemic Ethics. The course looks at the number of difficult ethical challenges and questions we are facing during COVID-19 and how to use some of the tools of philosophy to think through these questions, and to propose and assess competing answers.
Q1: The coronavirus pandemic has forced us to confront questions of meaning, purpose, and even truth. How do you see philosophy as helping us answer these questions?
A: The last 7 or 8 months have been overwhelming, in terms of both the radical changes to the way we live our lives, and the staggering amount of new information that we’ve all had to process. The average person knows much more about the basics of epidemiology, exponential growth, log scale graphs, infectious disease transmission, and universal basic income programs than they did in February. The average person has also made some pretty significant changes to how they socialize, parent, learn, work, shop, and travel. One thing Philosophy is good for is stepping back from all of this information and all these changes taking a big picture perspective on things. What lessons can we learn from all this new information? Have any of the changes been for the good? What value conflicts do these changes reflect? Are there any alternatives we haven’t explored? One way that Philosophy does this is by giving us the skills to reason by analogy; to link what seem like brand-new, unexplored questions to issues and questions we’ve considered in different contexts.
Q2: Do you see the pandemic as a catalyst for long term change?
A: There’s no doubt that ‘post-pandemic’ life will be very different from the world of February 2020. But while I think there’s a lot of hope that we’ll use the pandemic as an opportunity to “build back better”, I’m not particularly optimistic. I think that the long-term changes this will lead to are mostly going to be changes for the worse. I’m not an economist or a political scientist, so this less of a prediction and more of a hunch, but I suspect that racial, gender, and economic inequality will increase, that social cohesion will suffer, that small businesses will fail and large corporations will thrive, and that governments will find themselves increasingly constrained in their ability to solve pressing collective problems. But I’d love to be proved wrong!
Q3: What are the top issues that students are asking about in your class?
A: The students have all sorts of interesting and perceptive questions, but I’d say that the thing they're most interested in asking about is solutions. I’ve found it very refreshing. They want to know how we can best address the ethical challenges that the pandemic presents us, and how we can most fairly solve the problems and return to ’normal’ life. I don’t know that I’d call them optimistic, exactly, but they definitely are solution oriented.
Q4: How do you teach a topic that is rapidly changing, sometimes day to day?
A: I spend probably too much of my time obsessively reading the news, poring over case counts and graphs, and checking the Twitter feeds of doctors and epidemiologists, but I’m trying not to spend too much time in teaching the class on the day-by-day developments. There are some broad ethical questions— about inequality, the potential conflict between public safety and individual freedoms, the distribution of medical resources, and research ethics— that have been present in some form since the very beginning of the pandemic. These issues don’t change much from day to day, and I’ve tried to focus the class discussion on those broader topics rather than on the daily details.
I’ve also tried to use the rapid changes to the students’ benefit. We’re in the very strange position of having a brand-new textbook (The Ethics of Pandemics, edited by Meredith Schwartz) that was published in August but which is already unavoidably out of date. Philosophy textbooks don’t normally go out of date so quickly! So one of the main assignments for the course is to propose updates to the textbook; we’ll vote on the best update and make that the topic for the sending last week of the course.
Q5: To you, what the most interesting philosophical question to arise during the pandemic?
A: This isn’t so much a question as a really vivid illustration of a way I’ve long thought about moral philosophy: the best way to make good moral decisions— either as an individual or as an institution— involves synthesizing information and evidence from a really broad range of sources.
We can’t make good decisions about managing the pandemic without good empirical evidence. That evidence, in turn, comes from many different disciplines: from biology, medicine, epidemiology, economics, sociology, and many more. And in order to make good decisions, we need to know how to interpret that evidence, and epistemology and the philosophy of science give us the tools to do that interpretation. How should we reason under conditions of uncertainty, or when using a probabilistic model? How does evidence from different disciplines intersect in the real world? And them once we’ve done all that, were still need to engage in clear-eyed moral analysis. Given what we know, what values are at stake? How might these values conflict? How can these conflicts be managed? Who is particularly vulnerable, and how can that vulnerability be mitigated? How can we compare the costs and benefits of So for me the most interesting philosophical lesson of the pandemic is the way that this evidence-based, multi-disciplinary approach to moral decision making has become the stuff of the evening news, Twitter debates, opinion columns, and even sports reporting.
Other items of interest:
Janet Jones, third-year applied philosophy student, is the recipient of the prestigious Vanier Award for her research on drug addiction and harm reduction. The award is given to students who demonstrate both leadership skills and a high standard of scholarly achievement in graduate studies in social sciences and humanities, natural sciences and engineering, and health.
Dylon McChesney, PhD student in philosophy, is one of only four recipients of the Amit & Meena Chakma Distinguished Teaching by a Student Award this year. The award recognizes excellence in teaching with consideration for intellectual vigor and communication skills in the interpretation and presentation of subject matter while demonstrating concern for and sensitivity to the academic need of the students.
It's always great to hear from alumni. We'd love to know what you are up to, so please send an email to philug@uwaterloo.ca with personal and professional news.