PSA 1968 - Featured Philosopher - Michael Ruse.
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Michael Ruse shared a beautiful testimony on philosophy, belonging, and first conferences. Thank you Michael!
PITTSBURGH 1968
I arrived in a very wet Quebec City on September 17, 1962, on my way to do an MA in philosophy at McMaster University in Ontario. The next year, I was admitted to the doctoral program at the University of Rochester, just around Lake Ontario. In the summer of 1965, two years later, I dropped out with seven incompletes and one B. I don’t intend to dwell on past triumphs but, given that eighteen years later I got a Guggenheim, I think it was clearly not just intellectual ability that was a factor.
Above all, obviously, it was that I was very lonely and not at all coping with being in a new and in respects rather alien country. For someone with my historical interests, it didn’t help either that Rochester was a rather analytic department. I don’t say this in a negative fashion, for in many ways it was a very good department and, if only by osmosis, I learnt a lot about living life as a professional philosopher – publishing and so forth. It did teach me, what has stayed with me all my life, that in dealing with graduate students it is as important to care about their emotional lives as it is about their academic progress.
I returned to Canada and – this being the mid-sixties – even I managed to get a sessional job at the newly founded University of Guelph, where I stayed for the next thirty-five years. I would be there still but that I was in 2000 facing compulsory retirement and so I moved south to Florida State University, where I am still. All those warnings about marrying your students would be much more effective if it was pointed out that you are liable to find yourself in your mid-seventies still supporting teenagers.
As soon as I had to get up in the mornings, wash, and go to work, I reverted to my normal, rather-driven self. I discovered that I loved teaching and was good at it. I got on well with my new colleagues and they were willing to give me a regular job. But I still had to get that PhD, so – now newly married (the first of the student-wives!) – I set off back to the University of Bristol, where I had done my undergraduate degree. Suffice it to say that this time I was successful – although I might mention that the internal examiner on the viva was a former fellow student who (as it happens) never finished his own degree and gave me a grueling time on my comments about Thomas Kuhn.
I spent the year 1967-1968 back in Bristol working on the thesis – as dissertations are called in the UK. It all went very smoothly and by the summer of 1968, undoubtedly fueled by my time at Rochester, I was starting to think that publication must be the next move. (I do want again to reemphasize the importance of that Rochester experience. My colleagues at Guelph, all of whom were two or three years ahead of me, with doctorates now in hand, rarely if ever thought in terms of publication. Or if they did, only secondarily to serving on library committees and the like, a major item in a new institution like Guelph.)
Then I saw a call for papers for the new PSA conference at Pittsburgh – and that for me was and still is one of the most eventful factors in my whole academic life. Without hesitation, I wrote a paper and submitted it. I was one of a new cohort – most notably David Hull – who were working on the philosophy of biology. Most were motivated as was I – no one had done much work on it and what there was frankly was pretty second-rate. My paper was on defending natural selection from the charge of being a tautology. As I remember, my main target was Karl Popper who had argued just that, and I spent several happy pages showing just how wrong he was. I should say, looking back, that I still think he was wrong and like most of us was intensely irritated by the coterie of sycophants with whom he surrounded himself. I still think he was a brave voice for science and objectivity in the 1930s and 1940s when such voices were conspicuously lacking.
To my joy, the paper was accepted. As I remember, my wife and I put together our pennies and went out and had pizza. At the same time, the chairman Wesley Salmon sent a strong note about not exceeding the twenty-minute time limit. Came the fall, back in Guelph, I practiced in front of the mirror – remember this was my first public presentation – so I would not go over the limit. I was a lot more scared of program organizers in those days than I am in these!
Two or three colleagues and I drove down to Pittsburgh, I with paper in excited hand. Came the session and disaster struck. The regular chair was replaced by Peter Achinstein. He was (as now) at Johns Hopkins and already he had a reputation for being, let us say, somewhat brusque and harsh. Indeed, a year earlier I had encountered already an instance of this at our neighboring university in Waterloo where he was giving a paper. He challenged the audience to give him an example of an established law that was later discarded and I had volunteered the biogenetic law – ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. With a sneer, he dismissed me saying he was talking about real science, and that shut me up.
I got up, nervous as hell, and read my paper. It took twelve minutes and was given at such high speed no one was able to understand a word of it. There was an awful silence when I was finished. Then, to his everlasting credit and to my fifty-years-later gratitude, Achinstein lobbied an easy one at me, I relaxed and answered, and we ended by having fifteen minutes of lively discussion. I had triumphed. Not just then in that session but more generally and importantly in my own life. I had shown myself and the world that I was able to rise above the humiliation of Rochester and that I was good enough – so long as I worked hard enough – to play with the big boys and girls. To be a functioning member of my chosen profession and to contribute as well as to receive. That is why that first PSA meeting, in Pittsburgh back in 1968, has such a very special place in my heart.
Michael Ruse
Florida State University
