Professor Martin Benjamin
on Union College and his subsequent career in philosophy
I was originally drawn to philosophy by questions raised in a freshman English course taught at Union by Carl Niemeyer. The course centered on Plato’s Apology, Crito, and Phaedo, Voltaire’s Candide, and Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Somehow I became extremely interested in the free will question and the following year took a two-semester introductory philosophy course taught by Harold Larrabee.
Larrabee had studied at Columbia with John Dewey and, perhaps unlike Dewey, was a master teacher. He once wrote on one of my papers, “Shows good promise in the field.” The fact that 43 years later I still remember it suggests how much it must have meant to me at the time. I also remember Larrabee telling the class how much he loved teaching philosophy. “Where else,” I recall him saying, “can you do what you like to do more than anything else and get paid for it?” At the time he was Union’s highest paid professor — at, as I recall, $14,000 (1959 dollars) a year!
By the time I discovered that what I really loved in the novels (The Brothers Karamazov, The Magic Mountain, Ulysses, and others) I studied with Carl Niemeyer were the philosophical ideas and not their literary form, it was too late to change from an English major to philosophy. As a senior, however, I took a two-semester course in the history of philosophy with Sven Peterson and an independent study course on free will with Paul Kurtz, a new faculty member who later went to the University of Buffalo and founded Prometheus Press and the Humanist magazine. The independent study resulted in a long paper — a paper I’ve perhaps been revising ever since.
I’m grateful to Carl Niemeyer, Harold Larrabee, and Paul Kurtz for nurturing my philosophical interests. They and others like Henry Ferguson in history, Clare Graves in psychology, and Professor Mosley in biology (He was just “Professor Mosley” to us — I can’t even imagine his having a first name!) taught me to think and write clearly and independently. And, by example, they taught me to teach. I’ve had some success as a teacher, winning a number of awards for teaching (most recently Last Week the Paul Varg Alumni Award for Outstanding Teaching) and much of it is due to my trying to teach at a 45,000 student state university as I was taught at a 1,000 student liberal arts (and engineering) college.
After two years in the Peace Corps teaching 10th and 11th grade math and history in Ethiopia from 1962-64, I enrolled in the graduate program in philosophy at the University of Chicago. There I found myself immersed in analytic philosophy and philosophy of mind. I did a lot of work on Wittgenstein and the theory of action and wrote a free-will related dissertation showing that the concept of human action could not be reduced to bodily movement.
As I look back I think my contributions to the discipline fall in two main areas. First, I’ve been a fairly successful teacher and many of my former students are now successful doctors, lawyers, nurses, philosophers, and most importantly thoughtful, decent human beings. I’ve also taught seminars for graduate students in my department on teaching philosophy and since 1990 every two years I’ve taught a summer seminar on teaching for philosophy graduate students for graduate schools from all over the country. This seminar is sponsored by the American Philosophical Association and the American Association of Philosophy Teachers.
As for my writing and research, it has mainly centered on bringing aspects of technical or professional philosophy to bear on questions of interest and importance to educated nonphilosophers. Much of this work has been in the area of biomedical ethics — and my work has been published in such journals as the Journal of the American Medical Association, the New England Journal of Medicine, and (my favorite as a philosopher) the Journal of Liver Transplantation and Surgery. In this respect my work parallels that of Union’s Robert Baker. I met Bob in 1974 when we were both participants in a six week Summer Institute on Moral Problems in Medicine at Haverford College. This experience altered our careers and the careers of many others as we began teaching, thinking, and writing in biomedical ethics.
The title of my recent book Philosophy and This Actual World reflects this approach to philosophy. In 1907 addressing an audience of educated nonphilosophers William James said, “What you want is a philosophy that not only exercises your powers of intellectual abstraction, but that makes some positive connexion with this actual world of finite human lives.” If the problem was bad in James’ day, it’s worse now. Too often academic philosophy is over-intellectualized, supposing that the asker of philosophical questions might be, as Descartes entertained, a lone, disembodied spectator. Following James and Dewey (and Wittgenstein and, perhaps, Union’s Harold Larrabee), I argue that the asker of philosophical questions is, on the contrary, an embodied social agent seeking meaningful survival in a hard-edged world. Philosophical thought cannot be divorced from embodied action. Action without thought, to adapt a phrase from Kant, is blind; thought without action is empty. My book addresses general question of knowledge, reality, mind, will, and ethics and more specific questions about, for example, assisted suicide, the determination of death, and life’s meaning. I’d like to think that, like the work of Bob Baker and others like him, the book makes a small contribution to bringing academic philosophy closer to what James called “this actual world of finite human lives.”
Martin Benjamin
Department of Philosophy
503 South Kedzie Hall
Michigan State University
East Lansing, MI 48824-1032
benjamin@pilot.msu.edu
(517) 353-4617