Here, courtesy, as always, of Clifford Sosis. I've been a fan of Professor Trout's work for a long time, but this interview was a real eye-opener about his life and career trajectory. This observation of his is timely about his undergrad days at Bucknell:
The philosophy department at Bucknell back then was small, and mainly devoted to teaching. As devoted as the faculty members were, they didn’t stay in touch with professional movements in the field, and had little idea of what the good departments were in the country. So I didn’t have much guidance on that score. When I was considering grad school, in the early 1980s, the truly distinguished liberal arts colleges had drawn their faculty from truly distinguished graduate programs. And the advice they gave was regulated accordingly. Take one step away from those colleges, though, and a capable kid with a serious interest in philosophy could be at sea, relying on faculty advice that was impressionistic, outdated or hopelessly idiosyncratic. If there had been a Philosophical Gourmet Report back then – a real service to many thousands of young people over the years in precisely my position – I would have been spared a nearly abortive year of graduate work at Boston University. (I say ‘nearly’, because Louise Antony and Joe Levine were passing through BU at the time, and they were wonderful mentors that year.) I loved living in Boston.
And I got a kick out of this line:
Do any trends concern you?
The only distinctively philosophical trend that concerns me is the persistent anti-naturalism in traditional Philosophy departments. All of the other trends that concern me in philosophy are shared by many other disciplines, particularly in the Humanities – their proneness to fetishize cultural identity, their celebration of detachment from practical concerns, their constant alertness to, and search for, insult to their sensibilities, etc.
Amen to all that.
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