Assistant Professor of Philosophy Michaela McSweeney believes that philosophy is for everyone: all students, of all majors and all backgrounds.
After teaching middle and high school students in Boston, McSweeney went on to pursue masters and PhD degrees in philosophy. McSweeney joined the BU Department of Philosophy Department in 2016, and has taught: Introduction to Philosophy (PH100) and has taught Puzzles and Paradoxes (PH261), Metaphysics and Epistemology (PH340), along with Philosophy of Sport and Modality and Methods in Metaphysics and Philosophy of Science.
McSweeney’s academic interests include: metaphysics, the philosophy of logic and mathematics, epistemology, social, political and feminist philosophy, and the philosophy of mental health and illness. She conducts her courses by facilitating connections between students’ experiences and the concepts she teaches.
arts&sciences asked McSweeney about her expertise in mental health and social philosophy ahead of her upcoming Professor Perspectives Talk.
How did you become interested in your field of philosophy?
I have a lot of different interests in philosophy, but they are unified by an interest in two different foundational questions: first, how can we understand anything about the aspects of the world that we seem to neither perceive nor come into causal contact with? And second, how can we understand anything about what it is like to have different experiences than the ones we do have, or what it is like to be someone else? I also think these two problems are connected to each other in interesting ways, but I’ve only come to realize what I think that means recently. I initially became interested in philosophy in college (I didn’t know that it existed before then), when I took a logic class and a feminist philosophy class, and I think I’ve been gripped by basically the same problems since then.
What is your favorite course to teach at CAS?
I like teaching different things but my favorite course to teach is PH100: Introduction to Philosophy. I guess my favorite thing about it is teaching students from different majors and schools who either think they aren’t interested in philosophy, or don’t know what it is. I think it’s powerful and important to be able to step back and think about ourselves and the world philosophically, and I try to share that with my students and hope that they come to think so too. Obviously that doesn’t happen for everyone. Some people discover that they hate philosophy, and that’s okay! But I think it’s something everyone should be exposed to, especially now when our world is structured so that we almost never have time or energy to step back and think about things.
What perspectives do your students bring to class? How do students’ backgrounds contribute to philosophical discussion?
One of the great things about philosophy is that in comparison to some other disciplines it doesn’t require a lot of training to start *doing it* oneself; in fact I think it just requires a lot of un-training, because I think we’re all natural philosophers as kids—we ask hard questions about the world around us and care about the answers to them. What’s so fun about teaching philosophy is that my different students each semester think so differently about everything, and shape the way I think about philosophy differently too. How we were raised, what our backgrounds are, but also who we are, psychologically, as unique individuals obviously affects how we think about the world, and there can be something transformational about getting a group of people together coming from very different places and thinking about hard problems together, that gives you a new perspective on things you can’t get from just thinking by yourself about things.
Why do you consider modern society a “toxic world,” philosophically?
Ha! I think a better question would be what is not toxic about our contemporary world; answering this question would take years.
How do you tie current events into your more conceptual classes, such as Metaphysics and Epistemology (PH340)?
Depending on how I am teaching the course each time, I don’t always do this, but I do always introduce students to the fact that both metaphysics and epistemology can be done in different ways, some of which are more closely connected to issues that are more pressing for us in day to day life. For example, lots of metaphysics is pretty esoteric and abstract, but some of it is about stuff that concerns us all constantly—race, gender, money, national borders, and so on. Same with epistemology: tons of the epistemology philosophers are doing is kind of disconnected from our everyday experience because it abstracts away from it so much, but some ways of doing epistemology aren’t like this. I try to teach both ways of thinking about things in my classes. Though, I should say, I think there is a lot of value in thinking more abstractly/conceptually, and I don’t think everything has to be connected to something we thought we cared about independently to be intellectually valuable. (Just like lots of high-level non-applied math is valuable for its own sake, I think lots of abstract philosophy is valuable for its own sake too.)
How do you encourage your students to see the relevance and application of philosophical topics?
By making them figure that out for themselves through asking them to give examples in class, connecting things to their own experience, and asking them to decide for themselves whether they think a philosophical idea is right. I can’t learn anything unless I can really understand it for myself. That usually involves thinking about how to apply it to myself or incorporate it into the way I think about the world. I couldn’t arrive at that through someone else just giving me some examples or trying to motivate something for me. I assume my students are like me, so I try to get them to do the relevance/application work themselves as much as possible.
McSweeney’s research on oppression’s relationship to mental health will be discussed at the Professor Perspectives event, “Mental Disorder in a Toxic World,” on April 20 from 6 to 7pm at 100 Bay State Road, Room 613A. This lecture is co-sponsored by the Center for Gender, Sexuality, and Activism at BU.