Exchange last night in the elevator:
MY INTERLOCUTOR: What’s your field of study?
ME: Philosophy.
MY INTERLOCUTOR: Does that study, like, rocks and stuff?
"Austro" as in Rothbard and Wittgenstein, "Athenian" as in Aristotle and smashing-the-plutocracy.
About Roderick T. Long
The Empirical Me
I’m Roderick T. Long, Professor of Philosophy at Auburn University. I’m an Aristotelean/Wittgensteinian in philosophy and a left-libertarian market anarchist in social theory. (More about me here.) This blog, Austro-Athenian Empire, is a continuation of my earlier blog, archived here.
What was your reply?!
I went with “No, it’s more like ethics.”
“The little voice in my head is telling me not to talk to you anymore.”
Kudos to you Roderick, I probably would have just smiled politely and nodded.
You could have replied that it involves studying the constitutive conditions of, like, rocks and stuff.
Shouldn’t you have replied, “No. You are thinking of natural philosophy” ?
What type of person asked this question? Was it a student, professor, or some groundskeeper? I’m assuming this was at the university due to the original question, but I am aware that there are elevators elsewhere in the world, contrary to popular belief.
Neil:
Elsewhere in the world, maybe, but not elsewhere in Auburn, Alabama. Town doesn’t specialize in tall buildings.
(I lived in Auburn for about 10 years growing up, and in all seriousness I can’t remember even a single time I rode an elevator anywhere in town other than on Auburn University campus.)
I likewise hadn’t been in or known of any non-campus elevator in Auburn for the last ten years — until last month, because the Mises Institute now has an elevator.
I did know of a few others in town — the two-story classroom building at the high school had one, for ADA compliance purposes; I just never rode on it, as far as I can recall. I presume there are probably similar elevators for accessibility purposes in some of the other two-story buildings around town. I guess the new football condos that they built during the real-estate bubble probably also have elevators for the tenants, although I’ve never visually confirmed that.
Oh yeah — that reminds me that I’ve been in the Tiger Suites condo at Magnolia & Glenn, and although I didn’t ride in the elevator I could see that it had one.
And of course there are hotels around that have them. (Of course the Auburn Hotel has them, but it’s hard to say whether that counts as campus or not.)
Well, it was late at night and they were carrying equipment, so I would guess custodial staff, although I didn’t recognise them.
I don’t know what this popular belief is you speak of, I’ve seen elevators in plenty of non-academic places.
The response I usually get when I tell people I do philosophy is that they ask me to do some sort of psychoanalysis of them. Either that or they ask me to say something philosophical, kinda like comedians are asked to say something funny, and with similar results!
I get that as well, frustratingly it’s often while out around town trying to avoid deep thinking of any kind, so I usually just start by trying to show why they ought to stop insisting I talk philosophy.
Annette Baier, upon telling the person next to her on an airplane that she was a philosopher, was reportedly asked “what are some of your sayings?”
A philosopher friend of mine, when visiting her family, is sometimes asked at the dinner table, “tell us some philosophy.” (She works on the relation of causal dispositions to their categorical bases, so it’s hard to know what she should say.)
The most appropriate answer is surely “Yup: Life, the Universe, and Everything!”
So Roderick, how will the Auburn Tigers do this football season? Will Gene Chizick’s second season signal a return to SEC prominence?
I am so the wrong person to ask about that. In the words of Doctor Who: “Football’s the one with the sticks, isn’t it?”