Interview with Professor Christine Holmgren

Maureen Cohen, May 2003

Those of us who have taken one of Professor Holmgren’s courses will certainly appreciate some additional wisdom from her. I was fortunate enough to have been able to sit down, one-to-one and ask questions that I believe many students have wanted to ask. Professor Holmgren has been teaching philosophy at SMC since 1990. We began our discussion with:

What is the purpose or goal of philosophy?

Do you know what the word “philosophy” literally means? It comes from two Greek words, “philos” and “sophos”. “Philos” is the Greek word for love. It is the same root for the word “philanthropist”, “Philadelphia”, and there are others too. “Sophos” means wisdom. So “philosophy” literally means the love of wisdom. And so I think that’s what it started out to be.

Of course the ancient Greeks thought that any pursuit of wisdom… and by that they meant the pursuit of knowledge and understanding was part of philosophy and they didn’t see there being any distinction at all between the various disciplines that we now find on college campuses today. I think the ancient Greeks would have been appalled to see that the math department is way over there (pointing into the distance) and the science department is over there (pointing in a different direction) and the psychology department is over there.

Then, it was all considered to be part of the more general pursuit of philosophy and we especially see that in ancient Greek philosophy. And there is a real sense in which, if we trace the history of these various disciplines back historically, that philosophy is the mother of all academic subjects. In fact the word “academic” comes from the famous school which Plato founded called The Academy.

One of the things that initially attracted me to philosophy was its broad scope…
because I have always been interested in everything and there are no other areas of study where there exists such breadth. If you go into history, you just study history, if you go into psychology you just study psychology, you go into music, and you just study music. I wanted to understand how it all fits together. And the only discipline in which there is even an attempt to do that is philosophy. Not that philosophers are always successful, but at least they are attempting to understand how it all fits together.

So I think that the purpose or the goal of philosophy is to gain wisdom and wisdom is really an understanding of what is.

Why did you decide to focus your studies on the philosophy of mathematics?

I was pretty good at mathematics in grammar school, but I didn’t really like it very much. For me it was rather boring. I could solve all the problems according to the rules. I could manipulate the symbols the way I was taught to do so; but I thought what is this really about? I was much more interested in literature classes and things where there seemed to be more substance. And then when I got to college, I took some philosophy classes and I studied the ancient Greeks, early on. If you haven’t done that, I strongly recommend taking a class on Early Greek Philosophy.

The Greeks are just fabulous. I learned about Pythagoras. Pythagoras was a mathematician, but he was also a mystic. And he studied mathematics as a way of purifying his soul, and finding God. Reading about Pythagoras… opened up a whole new way of thinking for me about mathematics. Also, I had to take a lot of logic classes while I was in college because I was a philosophy major. Logic was my least favorite area of philosophy, but I had to take the classes because they were required. As I got up into more advanced logic classes, I began to see a very close connection with mathematics, and I also began to see that when we are doing symbolic logic or mathematics we’re not just manipulating symbols according to rules, what we’re really doing is studying some of the most abstract structures of the human mind that in important respects correspond with mathematical structure inherent in the universe itself. So there are also important metaphysical implications involved in the study of logic and mathematics.

In what way?

There is a whole sub-area of philosophy called philosophy of mathematics. The viewpoint that I first learned about within the philosophy of mathematics was the Pythagorean (often call the “Platonist”) view. According to this Platonistic view, numbers and mathematical truths are postulated to exist independently of us. They are understood to be things that we discover rather than conventions which humans invent. Immanuel Kant though, in the eighteenth century, maintained that the reason why there is so much universality in the field of mathematics, in all places and at all times, always obtain the same mathematical results whether a person lives in China or Russia or the United States… when she adds numbers up she always gets the same amount. It seems like we’re not just dealing with conventions. The way in which we represent numbers might be conventional, for example with Arabic numbers or with Roman numerals, but what those symbols are symbols of, seems to be the same for everybody. And Kant suggested that the reason why they are is because that’s one of the ways in which human beings classify and order our experience. So… when we study mathematics, we’re really studying the architecture of the human mind. This presents some very interesting implications.

Who is your favorite philosopher?

Of all time? I can’t say that I have one favorite. I think that the two that are really high up on my list… some of the others come and go, but these two always stay up there on that list are Plato and Immanuel Kant.

And why is that? Is it that their ideas are more ground breaking?

Oh yeah… definitely. Plato is just astounding. I teach the Ancient Philosophers philosophy class (Philosophy 3), it’s my favorite class. Whenever I teach that class, I never get bored, because each semester I see things that I didn’t see before. That’s how rich his philosophy is. And it’s ever fresh… there’s always new ways of understanding his ideas.

And what is your attraction to Immanuel Kant?

Kant and Plato are really rare philosophers. Most of the philosophers you look at through history don’t have anything really new to say, they’re basically taking old ideas and synthesizing, reorganizing and putting them together in a new way. Occasionally you might have a new insight here or there, but nothing that’s huge or profound. With Kant and Plato… their philosophies are huge, and profound, and they’re both really original.

When I think of Kant, I think of him as an ethicist because that is where I first learned of him, in an ethics class.

Well… I’m not really a fan of his ethical theory. When I think of Kant I think of his metaphysical and epistemol theories which comes through his Critique of Pure Reason.

Do you have a least favorite philosopher?

I’m not a big fan of most modern philosophers. I don’t find Daniel Dennet very interesting at all, except for his first book, Content and Consciousness . But most of his other stuff, he is just repeating the same ideas over and over again, saying nothing new, and completely ignoring most of the points made by his critics…never providing a proper response… I just think he is way overrated.

I also don’t care for Paul Churchland, I think he is overrated.

I like Thomas Nagel very much, and I think he is underrated.

What Philosophical question would you most like to have answered?

I think that my question would be about my personal identity. Who am I? And what role do I play? I think that the answer to that question would provide me with answers to all kinds of other related questions, for example, the question of whether or not there is a God. The answer to my first question might be that I am here to serve God. If there isn’t a God, then a much different answer would be given to my initial question that would also give me insight as to how to live my life. I think a lot of different things come together in that question.

Wouldn’t philosophers have to conclude that if there is a God, our purpose would depend on a positive answer to that question?

Not necessarily. In fact Aristotle believed in God, but he didn’t think that God paid any attention to us. He thought that God couldn’t think about anything that was subject to movement or change because Aristotle believed that God is the unmoved mover, and that God would always remain the same. For God to think about changing things, would change God. Therefore God couldn’t think about us and never listens to our prayers and has no concern for human beings whatsoever. So there you have it. If it turns out that Aristotle’s idea of God is the sort of God that actually exists, then it wouldn’t provide much insight into how I should live my life.

Are there new fields emerging in philosophy? Is feminist philosophy new?

I don’t think so. If you go back in history, you’ll find that there is a precedent, even for feminist philosophy that goes way, way back. I think that what is happening in our time is that many of these same philosophies that weren’t very well developed in the past are now being picked up and explored more and more thoroughly.

So there’s really nothing new to explore?

Well I think that there is, within given areas. But I thought you were asking whether there were any genuinely new areas.

So when you say that, are you suggesting that it would all stay within the realms of epistemology, metaphysics, and all the main topics of philosophy?

Yes, and that’s what I think feminist philosophy does. There is feminist epistemology, there’s feminist metaphysics, feminist philosophy of law, feminist philosophy of religion, etc. What makes all these feminist is that they are written from a feminist’s viewpoint but always within these same old areas. And so when they’re talking about feminist philosophy, what they’re really doing is dealing with the same old areas but grouping them together under the feminist interpretation of them, i.e., from the perspective of feminist writers. I don’t know that that is anything new.

Are there any areas of study which could use philosophical insight? Obviously the study of law, religion… but is there an area which doesn’t recognize the value of philosophical insight? How about computer science?

I’m convinced that almost all of the fields could use more philosophy. I think that so often people get caught up in their own ways of thinking in their own field that they don’t step back often enough to examine the basic presuppositions and concepts employed in their own disciplines… And that’s what a philosopher does.

You also mentioned that you wondered about how philosophy would interact with computer science. All computer science languages such as PASCAL, COBOL, FORTRAN, and so on, are all based on modern symbolic logic principles… and of course logic belongs to the field of philosophy.

In fact when I first graduated as an undergraduate, I got all kinds of letters from banks, computer companies and the military, inviting me to come in for job interviews. Now... I wasn’t interested, because I planned on going to graduate school, but I called one of the companies and asked “why would you be interested in a philosophy major coming in to apply for a job in the computer industry”? I had only one computer programming class as an undergraduate.

And they said “Well, we know that philosophy majors have to take a lot of logic classes and logic is the basis of all computer languages, and one of the things we found with philosophy majors is that they usually write pretty well. They have to deal a lot with ideas and they are also good problem solvers because they are trained to look at things from a lot of different perspectives. They’re more creative in their thinking than a lot of the people who come out of the field of computer science, as that is all they have been doing. They are much more articulate in terms of expressing their ideas to the general public or as intermediaries between programmers and other people in the company. We’ve found it is much easier to teach philosophy majors, who already know logic, how to deal with computer languages, than it is to teach computer people how to write and how to speak and to problem solve.

And also of course, law schools. The highest scores on the LSAT exams are achieved by philosophy majors…the LSAT exam is practically all logic problems.

I do have a lot of colleagues on campus that do inject some philosophy in their classes. In fact, more than a little in some cases.

Do you have a favorite student, someone who has gone on in the field of philosophy?

Miren Boehm, she studied philosophy here at SMC although she started out as a biology major. She switched majors while at SMC to philosophy. Subsequently she graduated with her bachelor’s degree in philosophy from UCLA and now she is getting her Ph.D. in philosophy from U.C. Irvine. I have other students who have gone on to medical school after getting their undergraduate degrees in philosophy.

Do you plan on offering any new courses in philosophy here at SMC?

One of my colleagues and I are planning on teaching a class, hopefully in spring semester of 2004, on the philosophy of non-violent resistance.

What would that involve?

Well, some political philosophy and some moral philosophy. Really, the idea is… there are other ways of responding to violence other than with violence. We are going to take a look at different philosophies of non-violence, like that of Gandhi, Tolstoy, Martin Luther King, and others… and also take a look at some of the differences between the philosophies. We’ll examine actual events in history of non violent resistance where people have attempted to use non-violent principles and methods. We’ll discuss whether or not they worked, and why or why not.

Thank you so much for your time Professor Holmgren. You have presented philosophy in such a dynamic way. I hope that everyone has an opportunity to take one of your courses.