Issue 14 | Fall 2022
Dr. Nicholas Ray: Reappointed and Awarded!
We’re thrilled that Dr. Nicholas Ray has been re-appointed in Philosophy! He’s also just been awarded the 2021 WUSA Excellence in Teaching Award. This award, presented by UW Senate, is the only teaching award selected entirely by undergraduate students, who’ve been able to enjoy and benefit from Nick’s superb teaching for years. We were able recently to catch up with him for a chat.
[Q1]. Huge congratulations, Nick, on the WUSA Excellence in Teaching Award! Tell us what it means to you.
Thanks! I was thrilled to find out that I was nominated, but I really didn't think I was going to win the award. Finding out that I had won was a great feeling. This award means a lot to me because it's about students and their experiences in the classroom. We are very lucky here at the University of Waterloo to have such fantastic students. I'm constantly reminded of their inquisitiveness, bravery, and hard work whenever I get to interact with them. They encounter tremendously challenging ideas. We tend to focus on the complexity of various arguments that we make available to our students, and sometimes forget the ways in which those arguments can be transformative of a student's worldview. It takes a lot of courage to be open to that kind of change. That openness is an intellectual and moral virtue. To be nominated by students about whom you think so highly is a real honour.
[Q2] You’re renowned both for your personal engagement with the class, as well as your use of a variety of novel teaching methods, including cutting-edge tech. Share some of your favourite teaching methods, and comment on how the remote learning pivot impacted your views on, and approach to, teaching.
I like to mix things up, depending on the material and the kind of students I meet in the classroom. Each class is different. I do a lot of interdisciplinary teaching, and that means one can't expect students to have a whole lot of shared background knowledge. This means that there has to be a healthy dose of traditional lecturing, with slides or scribbles on the board. But, after we settle into the material, it's great to do things that have us flipping the classroom. "Flipping the classroom" gives students asynchronous access to the basic stuff they need to get the contours of the course material, leaving class meetings for other tasks. Depending on the course, I make available lecture slides, lecture notes, and introductory videos to core content that get students acquainted with the most important aspects of the material. When we get into the classroom, we have time for discussion, group exercises, collective problem solving, or maybe even doing things like watching a film that brings these ideas to light. We also get to make connections to stories in the news, or what students are learning in other classes.
In terms of tech, there aren't many silver linings to the time we lost during the pandemic, but it did give us all familiarity with the usual distance learning platforms: Zoom, Teams, WebEx, etc. I focus on universal course design, trying to ensure that every student has a way of negotiating the material in a way they find conducive to their experiences, expectations, and abilities. That's why I've chosen to keep Zoom as an important tool, even for those fairly straightforward lectures. Students really got used to chiming in via Chat, and so I allow students to utilize that function in real time while we're having class discussions. I also utilize Zoom's imperfect but still pretty awesome live transcript technology to help students with hearing impairment or audio processing issues. And, since we record the lectures, everything is available to students after the fact. This helps students think of themselves less as stenographers and more as active thinkers. I want to use technology to offload tedious cognitive tasks so that we can open up the mind to explore those things higher up on Bloom's Taxonomy.
I've also found that discussion boards, and using software like Perusall for group readings and interpretations of important texts, can be a real help for students. When students can rely on one another as resources, instead of just the professor or the TA, then the opportunities for collective knowledge production go through the roof!
[Q3] And what are some of your favourite subjects to teach and why?
I love teaching anything that mixes together interdisciplinarity with a bit of history. The best way for us to learn new things is to be able to situate them in a historical narrative that brings together differing perspectives on a topic. I love teaching courses in cognitive science, philosophy of science, and bioethics for just this reason! I love when the tool kit we give students in the Arts interacts with the toolkit people get from doing work in the social, physical, and life sciences. I love being in a classroom that brings people together, especially when those people are bound to have diverging views of the world and the subject matter.
I think of myself as being an empiricist in the tradition of Helen Longino. I agree with her that we can't just make ourselves privy to some traditional conception of objectivity, and that the best way of getting knowledge about the world is through the careful and messy job of collecting different perspectives. We get to do that in the classroom, and that's pretty terrific!
Dr. Helen Longino, Philosophy Professor at Stanford University. Source: Alchetron, The Free Social Encyclopedia 2018.
[Q4] Tell us about your research interests and the things or issues that you’re currently reading about and paying a lot of attention to.
I'm currently interested in two projects, which I take to be related. The first has to do with what psychologists call top-down theories of perception, especially predictive processing theories of perception. I think that some of these theories have much to offer philosophers who have a long-standing interest in the contributions of the conceptual faculties of mind to even "normal" perception (i.e., perception of medium-sized objects in our environment). I say that these ideas are long-standing because they go back as far as Heraclitis in the western intellectual tradition, so we've been grappling with them for two and a half millennia! Having an accurate understanding of how perception is informed by our conceptual faculties helps us understand the way in which we can get a more or less accurate map of self and world, and how our minds sometimes hinder rather than help in that process.
The second project asks some of these same questions, but with a focus on 4E cognition: thinking of minds as embodied, extended, enactive, and embedded. One way to think about the mind is as a mostly closed off system, trying to make sense of the inchoate information it's getting from the senses. 4E theories challenge the idea of a closed off mind, showing the ways in which our bodies, aspects of our environment, and our social relationships, affect and sometimes even constitute our cognition–including the content of our thoughts, but also how we think. I'm getting more and more interested in how gender, race, age, disability, and disease affect cognition, with a special focus on perceptual experience and judgment.
[Q5] And how do you like to spend your down-time? What are some fun hobbies and leisure activities that you get up to?
I have two daughters who like to figure skate. This means I spend entirely too much time sitting around at a rink watching kids go around in circles. To my surprise, I actually find it good fun. I also watch much more soccer than any human being should, and allow my mood to be reliably connected to the fortunes and misfortunes of Liverpool FC. I enjoy going for walks, reading history books and contemporary literature, and playing with my pet bunny, Bow Tie. I also play guitar, though my axe spends a little bit more time collecting dust than I would like. Recently, my oldest daughter started to get interested in chess, so I've dusted off my terrible chess-playing abilities in order to give her an opponent that isn't just an algorithm. (At least I HOPE I'm not just an algorithm!)
[Q6] What remain some of your very favourite and most meaningful works of philosophy?
Wow! That's a really tough question. I suppose it's really tough because I like to read a lot of different philosophers. I still think my all-time favourite is Frege's Grundlagen der Arithmetik. I don't agree with much of the logicist project that is pursued in the book, but I love the way it's written and I love its focus on clarity. Frege really wanted a fragment of our language cleaned up so that it was adequate to do mathematics. Nowadays, we think of producing entirely new formal languages within which we can do mathematics. I like Frege's way of thinking about it, because I think he was right about one thing: mathematics is part of our language and part of our world-conception. Understanding with some clarity and precision how we can think about and apply mathematics is an important project, one that still doesn't have a canonical answer.
But, just to show I'm fairly eclectic, I've probably spent more time reading Hegel and Marx than Frege. I've spent more time reading Foucault and Butler, too! Even though I've been at this whole philosophy thing for a long time, I think it's important to go back and look at those classic texts, especially the ones that don't necessarily align with the kind of philosophy I do. Actually, I think all of these different philosophical points of view lend themselves to my current research. My interest in how the body and social environment affect cognition comes from Hegel, Marx, Fanon, Foucault, and Butler just as much as it does from any cognitive psychology I'm reading.
Fall Term News from our Chair, Dr. Patricia Marino
It's been an exciting Fall term here in the Philosophy Department with people coming back to in-person events and a full slate of colloquia and other happenings! One piece of great news is that we have a large and excellent incoming group of graduate students: 6 new MA students and 7 new PhD students. In the latter group, 4 are starting our program in Applied Philosophy. It's been a huge pleasure to welcome them to campus.
We have seminars this term on a range of topics including Non-Ideal Philosophy, Epistemology of Ignorance, Philosophy of Quantum Theory, and Fairness and Anti-Discrimination in Artificial Intelligence. We've already had a great start to our colloquium series with talks by Kate Norlock (Trent) on “We're Going Backwards": The Possibility of Moral Regress”, Gus Skorburg (Guelph) on "Persons or Datapoints?", and Patricia Marino, “The Ethics of Optimality: Values and Quantification in Social Decision-Making.”
Our department now uses an OWL device to make hybrid events easier -- the OWL has a 360° camera that uses sound detection to focus on whoever is speaking, while also showing the room and other virtual participants. In addition, the OWL is adorable and makes a "hoot" sound when you power it up. In addition to other benefits, the OWL has enabled people to attend our talks from across campus and even from other departments.
Next term we are looking forward to welcoming more speakers in our colloquium series; in April we will also host our Sharma Lecture on Science and Ethics which will be given by Dr. Jonathan Tsou: The Marvin and Kathleen Stone Distinguished Professor of Humanities in Medicine and Science, and Professor of Philosophy, at the University of Texas at Dallas; and editor of Technology Ethics (Routledge, forthcoming 2023).