Bryce Huebner

Faculty

Associate Professor of Philosophy

Age: 38

Hometown: Utah

Education: B.A. Westminster College of Salt Lake City, Philosophy; M.A. Colorado State University, Philosophy; A.M. Washington University in St. Louis, Philosophy; M.A. University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, Philosophy; Ph.D. University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, Philosophy

Areas of Research: Philosophy of Mind, Philosophy of Cognitive Science, Philosophy of Biology, Philosophy of Social Science

Time at Georgetown: 5 years

Courses Taught: Intro to Philosophy, Other Kinds of Minds (mental illness and cognitive disability), Sex & Death (Intro to evolutionary theory), Propaganda & Social Exclusion (perpetuating racial, gender and ability bias)

What led you to become a professor?
I think it was kind of an accident. My guess is there are dispositions that lead you to be more comfortable with challenging people and challenging their ideas and thinking hard about what’s gone wrong with them. The other thing is, I sort of got to a branch point where after I worked on my Ph.D. and my Postdocs, I was sort of up in the air on whether I wanted to pursue more heavily psychology or philosophy. I came to realize that the foundational theoretical issues were the things that bothered me the most. And trying to think about how to be better about experimental design and better about the empirical questions we ask. I was way more interested in that than carrying out experiments. I’ve done quite a few experimental papers that I’ve published, but I also get apprehensive every time I do one of them because I worry about what sorts of biases and assumptions are feeding into the questions we’re asking.

What is the greatest challenge in your field?
The biggest problem facing philosophy is that it’s got a long history of being controlled by white males. So what that means is that, you look at philosophy departments around the country, and about 30 percent of philosophers that are employed are female, which is a huge problem. Even worse, if you look at the representation of non-whites, what you find is that you aren’t going to find a lot of people. Racial and gender diversity are huge issues, as are opening up the field to being more accepting of people with various kinds of disabilities. It’s an old boys’ club in a sense. Fortunately, there are a lot of people trying to resist that now, but I think it’s going to be a hard change. Another thing is one of the things I try to do when I teach is to not just teach the white dude perspective. I spend a lot of time in my syllabi, making sure I get disability perspectives, the perspective of women, and really try to make it a more interesting and open field. I think that has to start early; I do it in my intro classes, in my other classes. I think it’s something we should all try to do in philosophy.

What is the greatest challenge in your concentration?
One of the things that I struggle with is getting people in my classes to realize that the most important part of philosophy is being able to figure out where ideas have gone awry, to diagnose them, and to call b——t when you see it. One of the things I try and do is to help people think about those issues by presenting a lot of diverging viewpoints in my classes, but at the same time it’s hard to get people into a mindset where they feel comfortable challenging. The university is structured in a way that is designed to get people to listen and to have people repeat the things they hear, and it’s hard to develop that skill which I think is the core skill of philosophy, which is asking questions and trying to figure out what the right answers are.

What have you learned from working with other departments on your research?
One of the things that’s really cool about working on things collaboratively is that you find yourself in a position where you’ve got some assumptions about how things should go, and the person you’re working with doesn’t share those assumptions and often, the process of working through the disagreements and figuring out what causes them and why they persist ends up being really productive. In a sense, it’s the same thing I like about teaching. I really like it when people disagree and we have to work together collaboratively to try to diagnose the disagreements. I find it a productive strategy.

What would be your ideal course to teach?
I get a pretty good amount of control over the things that I teach, so I routinely teach classes that I really love. The thing that I would most prefer is to get people in the class to the point where they feel comfortable enough expressing where they feel things have gone wrong or things have gone right. Occasionally, classes hit that point. But there’s always people in the classroom who feel like their voices aren’t going to be heard or their positions are so outside the norm in the class that they can’t express them without being shut down. So I think the ideal would be finding a way to cultivate a classroom environment that allows people to express their opinions and not feel like they were going to get shut down.

What drew you to Georgetown?
The academic job market is really tight. Only about half the people with degrees in philosophy will get jobs in the discipline, ever. When I came to Georgetown, there’s just a really interesting and diverse culture around the way that people do philosophy in the department. I found that really welcoming. Nobody does anything that’s even close to what I work on, but at the same time everyone’s open to chatting about it. And I get to hear about a lot of people’s research projects that are different from my own.

Interview by Sheena Karkal