Publications

Previous Page | Next Page

ANECDOTES AND ESSAY "FINDING PHILOSOPHY IN EVERYDAY LIFE," BY JOHN KRAUSER

Many, many people have devoted years to studying and doing philosophy, who now have jobs and career paths that do not include full-time tenured (or prima facie tenurable) jobs in philosophy departments in institutions of higher education. Even leaving aside people who enjoyed philosophy but did not carry on with it beyond undergraduate study, we know of many people who, after substantial investments of time and energy in postgraduate study and teaching, went on to do something different. There are dozens of people who have enough of an interest in, and affection for, philosophy to maintain contact with the APA while pursuing other than academic careers in philosophy. No doubt there are many more such people who are not visible to the APA.

Perhaps stretching a point, we call all such people "philosophers" and most careers other than academic philosophy "non-academic." Some of the people who appear in this section hold academic appointments in related fields, e.g.,. law, bioethics, or business ethics, and should perhaps be counted as specialized academic philosophers rather than people who have taken some other career path. Some have academic jobs far from philosophy: e.g., marine science, or veterinary oncology. Some have quasi-academic jobs, e.g., people working in bioethics in research institutions or teaching hospitals. And some have gone into academic administration or library work. There are several people whose work concerns creating examinations: for the Educational Testing Service, the Law School Advisory Council, and other similar organizations. There is nothing that could be called a "career path" that leads to such work, but there is at least a discernible track. Others really do have non-academic careers, some requiring additional study or credentials, e.g., law, medicine, public finance. And finally, others have varied careers that, on the face of it, have nothing whatsoever to do with academic philosophy, or teaching, or research: e.g., supplier of brewing supplies, strategic consultant, and cop.

The stories and sketches that follow are endlessly variable. Some people were undergraduate philosophy majors who developed a lasting affection for philosophy, but who went on to do something else. Some spent some time in graduate school in philosophy, others completed the Ph.D., and others still followed an academic career path for a while but then switched, perhaps after further study, to some other career. Some of these people are doing something that is recognizable as philosophy in their jobs; others are not. Some have a kind of job in which the application of philosophical skills and training is readily apparent; others have found new ways to put their philosopher's attributes to work.

We list these people, and relate the stories, to illustrate the range of careers that philosophers might pursue. Our view is that once you're a philosopher you can't stop being one. You may not put in the time and effort you once did on, say, the ontological argument or multi-valued logics, but you still do whatever it is you do in the manner of a philosopher. The lists are not meant as lists of potential contacts so much as an illustration of the variety of careers that philosophers have taken up.

This section contains three sorts of information. First, there are two essays by philosophers following non-academic careers. Second, there are briefer summaries of responses to a questionnaire from philosophers in non-academic careers. And third, there is a list of people who count as philosophers who have other sorts of jobs.

The lists have three uses. First, they provide possible sources of information for philosophers contemplating non-academic careers, though we have to caution the reader that lists like these go out of date fast. Second, the lists give some idea of the diversity of career paths that philosophers have followed, and in some instances created. And third, documenting philosophers in other than academic philosophy jobs might serve others as a source of moral support.

Finding Philosophy in Everyday Life

John Krauser

Associate Director

Ontario Medical Association

In this article, reprinted from the University of Southern Mississippi Alumni News, John Krauser explains how his philosophy education has helped both him and his co-workers in his medical profession.

Training in philosophy prepares people for real work in non-academic settings. The work philosophy prepares you for is hidden, but can be found in reflective organizations characterized in part by their having reflective people in power at the senior staff and/or elected officer level. Socrates is a role model for the practical application of philosophical skills in non-academic settings.

If I Take Philosophy, Where Can I Get a Job? After three years and an Honors B.Sc. in Chemistry and Philosophy at the University of Southern Mississippi, I spent three years in postgraduate work in ethics and philosophy at McGill. In 1973, I joined the Ontario Medical Association, which is the voluntary professional body for all 22,000 physicians in the Province of Ontario. I wasn't hired to do philosophy but there is not a question in my mind that I have been involved in philosophical work and have been a gainfully employed philosopher in a non-academic setting.

My work over the last 20 years has been in a department that actively recruited physicians committed to patient care and core professional values. This orientation is the key when patients and colleagues ask us for help in seeking improvement in health services. Consequently, I have been working philosophically on clinical policies and problems arising between patients and physicians, between families and physicians, between physicians and other health and social service professionals, and between physicians and various types of bureaucracies, in health law and medical ethics. This 20 years of experience is my database to support the view that training in philosophy has tangible, practical value to employers in the community.

Non-Reflective Organizations. In order to describe organizations where philosophical work gets done, let's start with the characteristics of organizations that are hostile ground for philosophical work. These are non-reflective organizations that:

1) Reduce issues to questions of power and the politics of power or recognize only predominantly technical problems in their field of interest and expertise.

2) See the world exclusively through their own corporate culture without interest or insight into the worldview of others.

3) Prize organizational loyalty more highly than the art of active and effective self-criticism.

4) Don't balance organizational enhancement or material self-interest, with any "other-serving" values, whether the "other" is patients, community, an ideal, or a profession.

5) Show a major investment in denial of organizational/professional blemishes.

6) Consider relating to the community, the public, patients and their advocates, etc., as only a matter of public relations left to crisis management.

7) Don't recognize the skills required to articulate, role model, and use core professional or organizational values to providing long-term leadership

8) Can satisfy immediate priorities only vis-a-vis membership, revenue, lobbying, political survival of elected Board, and/or CEO and have little time for planning or corporate value analysis.

Reflective Organizations and Reflective People. People with skills and training in philosophy will want to find reflective organizations to work for. First, you will want to ensure compatibility between the corporate mission, philosophy, culture, and core values that you recognize will give your work personal meaning. Second, it is in a reflective organization where your training can contribute to the corporate or professional bottom line. There are several defining characteristics of a reflective organization:

1) It has, believes in, and seeks to serve, some core values in addition to the material self-interest of the organization.

2) It has a senior staff and a Board of Directors who take pride in these core values and skillfully articulate them at all levels.

3) Their core values really do influence to some degree the day-to-day management and long-term plans of the organization.

4) It has reflective people with power in the organization whose job description includes guardianship and regular display of the core values of the corporation. Reflective people defend these core values against corporate exploitation, being sacrificed to self-interest, or being lost in our scientific North American culture.

5) Reflective people are those who take pride in achieving excellence in using the core values to define the organization or profession and being held accountable in public for this work.

6) Reflective people help keep these core values alive and vibrant by successfully demonstrating their capacity to guide the professional organization to meet new and unfamiliar social challenges.

7) Reflective people understand the significance of a core value that has survived the test of time, helped develop professional community, and defined the relationship between medicine and society.

8) The organization demonstrates skill, confidence and integrity in anticipating and dealing with conflicts between material self-interest and its core values. This skill shows up in the organization's track record of win-win solutions to these conflicts.

9) The organization is mature enough to not hide, back away, or refuse to acknowledge circumstances that will test its commitment to core values other than material self-interest.

10) Reflective people have a feel for the history of the organizational core values and the struggles that have gone on over time to keep them alive. Their perspective includes having a feeling for the history of ideals.

11) The core values statement is usually a very general principle and unless reflective people contribute to its interpretation and application to new circumstances, it is unlikely that all relevant considerations will be identified and weighed.

12) Reflective people recognize that the organization's core value isn't its exclusive preserve to interpret. As a public statement, it is subject to the interpretation and debates it generates in many other perspectives making up our society.

13) Reflective people open the organization to self-criticism, learning, and growth.

It is important to realize that there really are reflective organizations with these characteristics, but once reflective, not always so and vice versa. However, increased scrutiny and accountability of health organizations by the public, patients, and corporate or professional colleagues will continue to require organizations to demonstrate they have the skill to analyze and recognize their core values and to intelligently, with sensitivity, discuss them in the context of competing community values.

Once you have a reflective organization with some reflective people in power, it is possible to demonstrate the contribution of those with training in philosophy. In brief, I help reflective physicians sustain a reflective organization and a reflective medical profession. The key point is that I, as an intellectual midwife, help them accomplish this, but in the end, this is work physicians must choose to deliver for themselves and their profession.

How Does Philosophical Training Contribute to the Corporate Bottom Line? In my experience, much philosophical work gets done in a reflective organization when the organization is prepared to recognize that social change is challenging its core values. With increased pressure on the profession's service commitment and with vastly increased exposure in public forums and in the enormous communication potential of the media, the medical profession must demonstrate a very sophisticated ability to critically engage social change in light of its core service values and be able to provide its share of moral and intellectual leadership in society. Let me offer four recent examples of this work in Ontario.

Challenging Conventional Wisdom. Ontario may accept that patients who want active medical assistance in dying can make this request of the medical profession in Ontario. It is doing philosophy to analyze whether the core values of the profession to relieve psychological suffering includes acceding to this request. We have gone through a very Socratic exercise where the physicians have said "no" from the beginning, but after a series of challenging questions, can now provide a detailed ethical analysis to support this position. In going that extra mile, they demonstrated real understanding of their own traditions, a respect for the human experience of patients who are suffering psychologically from their progressive deterioration, and the value placed by society on protecting the life of its vulnerable members. It is important to be right, but the most the philosopher can do for the corporate bottom line is to ensure the profession can show it is really struggling with important competing values. This work shows the respect due this issue.

Framing the Problem and Leadership. The fact of physician sexual abuse of patients became a matter for public exploration recently, causing much anguish all around, although much relief to the victims. The role of philosophy in the early stages was to help the organization get on with finding a frame of reference to properly understand the phenomena and identifying the many different elements that had to be addressed to reconfirm professional control of members' behavior and commitment to meriting the public trust. This intellectual work tangibly shortened the time the organization needed to provide leadership and exude confidence and competence that the problem had a solution at the end of the tunnel. This served to moderate the sense of humiliation felt by many physicians in Ontario and helped us get on with addressing the needs of the victims and the profession.

Making Values in Action Explicit. The OMA has been busy in the fields of doctor-patient communication, bioethics, and physician health programming over the last eight years. These projects were ad hoc and had a life of their own, unlinked to any common or explicit organizational policy. In a very philosophical activity, the common features in these activities were identified and they were found to have a common policy foundation that was ultimately shown to be an expression of the core mission of the organization. This process of identifying the values implicit in action and making them explicit and available for rational future planning and critical appraisal, feels very similar to the kind of work one does in philosophical and ethical analysis.

Accessing Different Points of View. Finally, the medical profession in Ontario has had to interpret its core service values in light of the rapid progression of many social movements, the growth in patient autonomy and choice, the independence demands of the disabled, multiculturalism in health care, etc. The women's movement required significant intellectual work to get inside women's experience with the health care system and how the changing role and position of women in society impacts on the doctor- patient relationship. Those trained in philosophy are good at listening and gaining an understanding of different perspectives. I use this skill to help us find common ground between these movements and the goals of medicine. Our work on different points of view in society often results in the OMA turning up on the progressive side of the spectrum to the benefit of all concerned.

The Philosophical Servant as a Leader. In the field of bioethics, there has been an oil-and-water relationship between physicians interested in the ethical aspects of their clinical work, and their profession, vis-a-vis academic philosophy. The latter saw these physicians as amateurs dabbling in their field, while the physicians couldn't use the academic work to help clarify their duties in clinical settings. The way to avoid irrelevance is to dedicate your philosophical discipline and skills to advancing the intellectual foundations and the sophistication of intellectual activity in practical professional fields, for the mutual benefit of the profession and sick people. It is in this kind of service that non-academic philosophers can hone their Socratic skills and provide real leadership. The style of leadership here is as a servant to the core values of the profession (or institution) which are different from the scientific knowledge and research underlying the field. By doing intellectual work in this context, you are not advancing either science or academic philosophy, but you are advancing the ability of scientists and clinicians to relate their work to the other major values in society, to their own social or intellectual history, and to the fabric of social, intellectual and legal ideas in the larger community, both present and past. I think this work is philosophical in that it deals with foundational thinking. Its method reminds me of Socrates in its emphasis on self- knowledge, questioning, intellectual midwifery. It is a viable and real alternative to academic philosophy for those still turned on by the field. If you find core values and service commitment you can respect, make your contribution to society by way of improving the intellectual work of a relevant profession (institution).

General Observations on Why Philosophy Works. You can know enough to spot uncritical thinking and bias without being an expert in the technical aspects of a field. This is because of the extensive common ground that exists when physicians go from clinical decision-making and clinical politics to the human condition, values and social policies. There is a learning curve here for the philosopher interested in accessing this common ground, but is it accessible with hard work and the trust of physicians. I believe that training in philosophy gives you an ability to move thinking in this arena towards secure, intellectual foundations with a subsequent increase in credibility for the product. The climate of uncertainty you generate when a comfortable position is subsequently seen to be based on superficial thinking need not end up in anger and withdrawal, but don't be surprised at the reaction. I found in otherwise very sophisticated organizations, that people could be very unclear about what values were driving the operation, what their goals were and how little rational strategic planning went on. Someone with philosophical training finds this situation intolerable and makes a solid contribution by challenging the lack of intellectual rigor, and helping to show what the organization is capable of achieving in this regard. Success in this task makes you ultimately useful, which addresses this tendency to react with anger.

You can't underestimate the forces in the real world that induce: narrow thinking, isolation (organizational and professional), close-mindedness, a tendency to perceive the world and life only through one's field of work, our ahistorical outlook, very little feel for our intellectual and social roots, and no patience with the world experience or vision of other people. These forces are a real problem, but generate a need for our skills as the philosopher tries to help a moral institution or profession give day-to-day expression to its fundamental values.

People shrink from uncertainty and like to reduce issues to manageable bites. They also reinterpret their core values and commitments in convenient ways to escape uncertainty. However, you can't always escape in this fast-changing world. In the case of the physicians, the more the public, with its different values, asks for medical services more in tune with its changing needs and experience, the more you have value conflicts where value clarifications and analysis are helpful. Both parties usually don't have the relevant core values articulated or even recognized, and, as such, can't work with the conflicts to find common ground. Philosophy can be a lot of help.

What Skills are Involved in Philosophical Work? The skill is to ask questions that bring out bias, tunnel vision and simplistic problem depictions in a manner that leads to growth because it's not demeaning or destructive. This process energizes the learning mode and confidence in this process and demonstrates that exploration and discussion of value-laden concepts or problems is a rational exercise and not terminally wooly or subjective. The primary growth I want to see takes place in reflective physicians with clinical credibility and leadership potential with their peers. With foundational help from an intellectual midwife, reflective physicians will be the ones who design the policy, mission statement, or recommended action.

The work has a very definite empirical component. We work with what people say, what people say they mean or do, and what in fact they do, with service gaps and conflicts between patients and physicians, conflicts between physicians in terms of roles, and the intellectual aspects of policy formation and planning. There is much writing and rewriting in exercising the enormous effort required to go from muddled dialogue or thinking, to clarity in the identification of the real issue(s), or to a vision of what people really want to see happen. I am continually working with multiple world views, the patient's experience of illness, community and academic physicians, government, the well public, ethnic groups, young and old, male and female, so there is a broad horizontal feel to the work in contrast to vertical depth. The strength of the Socratic method really derives from the practical expertise you develop from the breadth of experience gained helping with value clarification and the process of clear thinking in these many different contexts. The philosopher, unlike others, is comfortable putting on these multiple perspectives and experiences, and using their similarities and differences to help analyze the matter at hand.

How Does the Philosopher Find Non-Academic Work?

1. Identify what values you feel will make your life meaningful.

2. Find organizations that appear to share those values.

3. Find the subset that are reflective (i.e., reflective people in power).

4. Sell your analytic, communication and thinking skills

5. Understand the concept of the servant as the leader, and the Socratic method.

6. Merit trust, respect others, and maximize integrity.

7. Once hired, be prepared to grow.

Previous Page | Next Page