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Michael Hagan
Hello and welcome to the Providence College Podcast. I'm Michael Hagan from the Class of 2015, and I'm joined by producer Chris Judge from the Class of 2005. Our guest today is Dr. Ed Dane, professor of Philosophy and recipient of the 2022 Joseph R Aquino Teaching Award, Providence College's Highest Honor for Teaching Excellence. Dr. Dane came to Providence College in 2011 from the University of Chicago, where he was a Harvard Schmidt fellow in the humanities.

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Michael Hagan
He earned his Ph.D. at Cardiff University in Wales and has taught philosophy in the United States, the United Kingdom and Norway. Dr. Dame, thank you for joining us.

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Ed Dain
Thanks very much. It's great. Great to be invited.

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Michael Hagan
So college application season is upon us and high school seniors are anxiously considering their next educational chapter. Why should students applying to college consider schools that encourage or even require the study of philosophy?

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Ed Dain
That's a really good question. You know, one reason is just that there are real practical benefits to studying philosophy because it focuses so heavily on skills of reasoning and argument and analysis that makes students who've studied philosophy really employable. So there's a there's a good kind of practical reason, kind of career orientated reasons for wanting to study philosophy much deeper reasons, too.

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Ed Dain
It seems to me, you know, we're not all going to be nurses or lawyers or doctors or accountants, but in a sense, all of us already are philosophers. We just can't help taking a stand on philosophical questions. We're always going to run into ethical issues. We're always going to need to think about what kind of society we want to live in and so who we should vote for and things like this.

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Ed Dain
So philosophy is really relevant to so much of our everyday lives. It seems to me that we have really good reasons for wanting to studying it with maybe one wanting everyone to study so that that's why I asked this question, why everyone should should pick a college where they're forced to study philosophy.

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Michael Hagan
You mentioned that philosophy in addition to much deeper reasons for studying it, it helps make students employable. Are there any well known or notable figures who our listeners would be surprised to know studied philosophy?

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Ed Dain
Yeah, you know, there is there are so many. There are huge lists of famous people who've studied philosophy online. I'm terrible at remembering them. There's it's a really popular route into politics. So I think Emmanuel Macron, the current French president, is a philosophy student. Your former philosophy student. I think both of the candidates to be the next UK prime minister.

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Ed Dain
Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss both studied philosophy as part of this, this PPE degree that is pretty popular in the UK. It's philosophy, politics and economics. It's also a popular route into law. Famous people like Harrison Ford, Rashida Jones and the actress. So you should look online there are so many. It's actually surprisingly popular.

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Michael Hagan
And why should say business students or students outside of the humanities? Why shouldn't they sleep through their philosophy courses as students here?

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Ed Dain
Well, one one good reason is that if they do that, they're going to find their course very practical. It seems to me the philosophy really emphasizes the ability to think independently, the ability to think for yourself, whatever the subject matter is that that's what I'm trying to teach my students, is what my colleagues are trying to teach their students right.

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Ed Dain
I think in a way, philosophy does that better than business studies. So when you go out into the world, if you want a career in business, you want to be employable. I think philosophy and other humanities disciplines really encourage those skills that are going to make you employable. And it's a it's a start that philosophers love to kind of gloat over.

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Ed Dain
His philosophy majors tend to do much better on graduate entry exams like the gym at the graduate business school than business students actually do. So if you're a business student and you're thinking, well, who cares about this philosophy stuff? Paying attention to studying philosophy and really thinking seriously about philosophical problems and arguments is going to help you achieve the goals that you set out to achieve when you chose to study business.

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Michael Hagan
Now, philosophy, of course, it's it's not all just banging your head against a copy of the critique of pure reason. There's a lot of engagement and hands on learning involved. What are some examples of interesting student research projects in philosophy from recent semesters?

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Ed Dain
That's great. Yeah. I've supervised the couple. I think the most recent one I supervised was actually on philosophy of mind. In the Catholic philosophical tradition. Much contemporary philosophy of mind is very kind of materialist or physical based. It kind of takes, as its starting point the assumption that we're just physical beings in a physical universe and when we die, that's it.

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Ed Dain
Right. So this student really wanted to to think about how we could think about the mind in a way that makes room for the Catholic belief in life after death. So that was a really interesting research project for me to work on with that student. I supervised other ones on figures like Kierkegaard and Vic and Stein and colleagues have supervised some of them on feminism.

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Ed Dain
It's really all kinds of topics. I think there was one little warning on Mad Max, the film, so there were plenty of really interesting research topics out there that our students are engaging.

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Michael Hagan
And what are some of our recent philosophy alumni from Providence College up to these days?

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Ed Dain
Well, again, it's a real mix, actually, of interesting things. Some go into grad school in philosophy, obviously, at the master's level or at the party. We've had some go on to grad school in law and now someone is doing Teach for America. Another who's just gone into finance. So it's it's a real smorgasbord of different options and it opens up.

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Michael Hagan
Right. So your philosophical research and you just mentioned Vic and Stein is its focused largely on the thought of Ludwig Wittgenstein in connection with as you're and I'm pulling this from your faculty bio page but largely in connection with a wide range of areas of philosophical inquiry like ethics and epistemology. For those of us for whom second year serve feels like a long time ago, can you give us a brief free introduction to Vic Einstein, the man?

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Ed Dain
Well, yeah. So Vic inside the man, he's actually a really interesting person with quite an extraordinary three life. He was he was born in Vienna in 1889. And I think his family were one of the richest families in Austria, probably in Europe at the time, extraordinarily cultured. He had he was the youngest of several brothers and sisters. I think most of most of them regarded him as the kind of stupid one in the family.

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Ed Dain
Actually, he went off to study engineering initially and then switched to study philosophy under Bertrand Russell in Cambridge. Russell, I think initially regarded big in science, is stubborn and annoying, but within a very short space of time. He was kind of describing Vic and Stein as being really the next big thing. That was in 1912, 1913. Obviously, World War One broke out Big Einstein as an Austrian went to fight for their central powers.

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Ed Dain
He signed up as an ordinary soldier. He was recognized the bravery. He finished his first book in a prisoner of war camp. Since that book, which was only like 80 pages long since that book, according to him, solved all of the problems of philosophy. He then retired. He became a gardener for a little while. He became a schoolteacher and some remote villages in Austria.

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Ed Dain
He designed a house for his sister, and then in the late 1920s, he started to have some kind of new thoughts and doubts about his earlier claim to have to have definitively solved all the problems of philosophy. And that led him back to Cambridge, spent most of the rest of his life working there, trying to produce his kind of next masterpiece, the philosophical investigations.

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Ed Dain
If you're interested in his life, there is actually a really fantastic biography of him by a guy called Ray Monk. It's one of the great philosophical biographies.

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Michael Hagan
We can we can drop a link to the page to purchase that biography into the show notes. So if anyone interested, you can find it there. So in layman's terms and you mention that, you know, Vic and Stein and the early in his career kind of felt that he had figured it all out, had solved philosophy, and then started second guessing that as the decades went on and, you know, went back to the grindstone in layman's terms or as close as we can get to them, what are some of the unique or otherwise significant aspects of Vic and Stein's thought?

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Michael Hagan
Either his early thought or his later thought.

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Ed Dain
Yeah, well, one one kind of current that runs throughout his store is this idea that philosophical problems are characteristically confusions. They're not real problems at all. The way to solve them is to investigate the way those problems are phrased, the words and the concepts that are used to form them. And through that, Vic Einstein thinks we'll discover that we're misusing those words.

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Ed Dain
So we're not really saying anything at all in his early in his later work, he has different ideas about what exactly the analysis of language involves. But that's the kind of crucial idea that runs throughout his thoughts, that philosophical problems are actually a form of confusion, and we need to treat them with a kind of therapy almost rather than provide substantive answers to them.

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Michael Hagan
So how did you come to be interested in philosophy generally and Vic and Stein specifically?

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Ed Dain
Yeah. So it's kind of by accident. I think a lot of philosophers will tell you this. They ended up studying philosophy by accident. I went off to study literature and philosophy at Cardiff University as an undergrad. Literature was what I was really interested in. I didn't really know what philosophy was. There was really just a word for me.

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Ed Dain
It sounded kind of cool. I thought maybe it had something to do with Aldous Huxley, who was famous for writing The Doors of Perception, where he took some experimental drugs and described his experiences. I really had no idea what philosophy was about. After a year or two, studying it in Cardiff, I found that although I loved studying literature, it was kind of easy and it didn't feel so rewarding as a result, whereas the philosophy I found really hard, I was getting terrible grades.

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Ed Dain
So counterintuitively I thought that's what I should really spend my time working on in another sense, you know, it wasn't so accidental at all because it turned out, as I as I learned more about philosophy, that I had really been interested in philosophical questions for a long time. I just didn't really know that that's what they were. So when I first started studying Philosophy of Science, for instance, I found that lots of worries I had about the status of science were actually being raised in a really significant, interesting way by philosophers I was reading, and for me they were kind of this this vague unhappiness at my science lessons as a, as a kind of

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Ed Dain
teenager. So so it's partly accidental and partly really not accidental at all. And then thinking. STEIN You know, as I learned more about philosophy, it was a similar kind of thing with with the move from literature, philosophy to philosophy, I found that I could understand a lot of philosophers, the vision sign I really couldn't understand. So I figured I ought to spend more time working on that.

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Ed Dain
And I started to be really kind of sucked in by his vision of what philosophy was really exciting. There was some really interesting work being done on vacant sign at the time by two people Corey Diamond and James Cone and which which made it a really lively thing to work on. And I just got hooked. And I really do think that the Viking science approach to philosophical problems is, is really promising.

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Ed Dain
So that's how I, that's how I ended up kind of focusing on first on philosophy and then on vague.

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Michael Hagan
I like your approach of, you know, like you said, kind of counterintuitively diving right into the stuff that you're struggling the most with. I think it's it's challenging, but it sounds rewarding. So tell us tell us a little bit about your career before coming to Providence College. I'm interested in particular in your experience at the University of Chicago and also your time teaching in Norway.

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Ed Dain
Oh, yeah, right. Yeah. Well, well, before both of those I studied in, in Cardiff in the UK that that was really lovely. I had a wonderful experience there in my undergraduate, my master's and my Ph.D. there. At the end of that I went to University of Chicago mostly to work with this guy I just mentioned James Cone and Jim Conant, because his work on frequency was so interesting and at the time he was running a big insane workshop with lots of really exciting speakers coming in all the time.

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Ed Dain
So it was a great place to be. I think I really learned how to think in an exciting and original and constructive way about philosophy from my experience in Chicago. So it was a it was a really wonderful opportunity for me to be there and to to work with these really fantastic philosophers. As a half a minute there, I taught in the in the core curriculum, Greek thought and literature teaching texts that many of which come up in the first semester of DWC here.

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Ed Dain
So that was really, really great. That's where I kind of formed my love for these texts. I haven't mentioned Norway, but yeah, I've done some teaching in Norway too. But one of the things I love about Norway's that actually all students, no matter what the subject, has to study philosophy. So it takes that PC model and it applies to everyone.

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Ed Dain
I think that's fantastic there. It's a real social commitment. I think that to be a good citizen, you've got to take a view on these things.

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Michael Hagan
So so you mentioned there the the Western Civ program that we have here at PC. How do you enjoy teaching in that program?

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Ed Dain
Yeah, it's great. It's really great. You know, like I said, I, I started teaching texts like the Iliad, like Herodotus, like Sophocles, Aeschylus and so on. Back in Chicago. And to me, you know, looking to move on from from there at the end of my fellowship, it was a real concern that I wouldn't get to teach these things again, because they're not part of a standard philosophy curriculum.

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Ed Dain
So the fact that I get to to carry on teaching these texts that kind of fall outside the standard philosophy curriculum is really wonderful. And also working with, with colleagues in, in history and literature, fantastic people like Steve Smith and Ian Byrne hosting I'm teaching with right now. It's, it's really wonderful. It's really invigorating. I like that a lot.

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Michael Hagan
How would you and you're you're something of an authority now is the Arena Award winner. You're an authority on pedagogy. So, you know, how would you describe your approach to teaching philosophy?

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Ed Dain
It's such a hard thing to describe in a way, but, you know, for me, philosophy is essentially a practice. It's a skill. You don't learn about philosophy, you learn to philosophize. And that's really my emphasis, is to get students thinking for themselves and coming up with their own answers, coming up with their own criticisms or arguments in support of the kind of views that we're reading about.

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Ed Dain
But essentially, it's all about thinking for yourself. That's that's if I can sign up in one short phrase, it's just about that.

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Michael Hagan
I hope I'm recalling this right. But when I was abroad as an undergraduate, I remember a lecture in which a philosopher described philosophical questions as one that other methodologies have not found ways to answer. What are some examples of enduring philosophical questions that other disciplines fall short of answering?

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Ed Dain
That's funny. Yeah. I don't know if I agree in a way that that's true of what a philosophical question is. But but there are so many wonderful questions out there that really do go back to the time, the beginnings of philosophy. I structured my intro courses around, you know, a new philosophical question each week. So sometimes it's it's about what kind of life we want to live.

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Ed Dain
Sometimes it's about what the nature of justice is or the nature of value. It might be about the kind of society we want to live in or whether we have a moral duty towards towards a society to obey its laws could be more abstract. Questions about what we are as human beings are what the mind is, whether it whether we really are just a physical thing in a physical universe like we were talking about earlier, or whether the mind is something separate from the physical world, more contemporary topics like the nature of race and gender, for instance, the students really are often kind of confused about and want to try and understand the different possible

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Ed Dain
positions on the nature of science and why it's why it's reliable. Whether there's a scientific method that distinguishes scientists from other things. Lots and lots of different questions like this.

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Michael Hagan
So you mentioned a few questions that that, you know, are almost like ripped from the headlines in a sense that, you know, are there are there philosophical questions that we're struggling with now that are really products of the modern age and of the information age that, you know, didn't really exist centuries before?

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Ed Dain
Yeah, definitely. Definitely. I mean, especially in ethics questions that are evolving all the time, we have questions about climate justice that are not really one. We're in on the radar. You know, 50 years ago, questions about technology and its uses, its uses in medicine, its use in warfare, for instance, that are obviously modern questions. We've got questions about the mind and the extent to which the mind is like a computer and vice versa.

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Ed Dain
The extent to which a computer could possibly have itself a mind. All of these questions are kind of questions that arise as a result of developments in modern technology. And like you said before, the questions fall away. We develop we do develop methods and the questions my view is that it kind of changes the questions, but whatever they get sucked out of philosophy into different disciplines, other questions fall out of fashion and then some of them come back in again, like in the ancient world, the question, you know, why should we be good at school was a really important philosophical question.

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Ed Dain
This went out of fashion several hundred years, and now it's kind of an important issue for people to be thinking about. Okay.

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Michael Hagan
So overall, what do you enjoy most about teaching philosophy at Providence College?

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Ed Dain
Well, we have we have some wonderful students and and we have some wonderful colleagues. So that's that's really great. I personally I love I love teaching the required courses. I love the fact that I get to introduce students from across the university to philosophy for the very first time. I think that that's really exciting and really valuable. I love the range of different philosophy courses I get to teach.

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Ed Dain
I forget how many different areas it must be taught now, but it's a lot. It's more than ten, I think. And then I love the interdisciplinarity, the fact that, you know, through DWC, I get to I get to teach not just texts from other disciplines, but also different perspectives on philosophical texts. I teach them in a way you wouldn't necessarily approach them in a pure philosophy course.

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Ed Dain
This semester, this coming semester, we are teaching philosophy of mind to neuroscience students for the first time. That that kind of opportunity to work with other departments I think is really valuable is really exciting to me.

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Michael Hagan
So you mentioned the wide range of courses that are offered here at PC and Philosophy, so I just want to open the floor here a little bit. Are there any particular courses that you or your colleagues are offering in the coming academic year that you want to plug?

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Ed Dain
Yeah, well, I'll always plug my my philosophy of mine course, because I love teaching. I love to get lonesome students in that. You know, we have we have three and Sina award winners in the philosophy department. Now, it's not just me. There's Chris Arroyo. There's Florence Morgan. We've got a couple of senior faculty who really should have won the Chino Award but haven't like Pete Costello and Lucia Carlson.

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Ed Dain
And then we've got other faculty who really, I'm quite sure, will win it in the future like a man. Alabang Anthony Lynn Let's see. So I would, I would say, you know this, we've got fantastic faculty to study with and pick courses with these people because you learn a lot and you really enjoy it.

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Michael Hagan
Well, Ed, thank you so much for joining us today on the podcast. You have me really wishing that I could go back and take some philosophy courses. Marsh Philosophy courses as an undergrad. And so this has been a really great conversation. We've learned civic and and learn more about you. There's been a great time. Thanks for joining us.

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Ed Dain
Thanks very much.

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Michael Hagan
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