An Interview with Kirk Surgener

Director of Student Experience and Progression for PPE.

Welcome to our Interview with Kirk Surgener.

1. Tell us about your journey, academically and otherwise. 

When I was first deciding what to study, I had my mind set on psychology, because I was familiar with that. I studied psychology at university too. I’d come to the understanding that if you studied psychology at university and did enough of it, you could become something that’s called an accredited psychologist.  

I didn’t know what that would mean in terms of what you would do for the rest of your life, I had no idea. All I knew is that I was familiar with it and wanted to do more of it. By sheer happenstance, one lunchtime my English teacher in high school said we’re going to do a session on philosophy if anybody is interested in philosophy. 

That was my first time I encountered philosophy. There were only about four or five of us and he talked us through George Berkley. So George Barkley famously argued that there aren’t any material objects. The things that we take to be material objects such as tables and chairs are really just a collection of ideas in people’s minds and that’s kind of crackers but it sounded interesting. So I found myself starting to think about why I had a particular picture of the world that I did. 

I decided that if I was going to study psychology I would study psychology with philosophy because philosophy sounded interesting and I started to read some philosophy as well, stuff like Nietzsche etc. 

When I went to university, I quickly realized that I wasn’t that interested in psychology. All of the things that they were studying were not the parts of psychology that I was interested in. Cognitive psychology, developmental psychology, the sort of mainstream psychology – this is what psychologists were interested in. I was more interested in social psychology, and fringe stuff – Freud and that kind of thing. 

And also psychology first year was basically A-Level again. But fortunately, where I studied was very flexible – you could change what you were majoring in. So I did philosophy from that point. 

Then I continued on, just because I was interested in philosophy and people were telling me that I was good at it. So then I did a master’s in philosophy and a PhD in Philosophy from Birmingham University. I then taught philosophy for a while. I taught philosophy in a university that no longer has a philosophy department – so I got made redundant in my mid-twenties. I then came to Warwick, where I have been since 2015. 

2. What do you think is unique about how Warwick teaches philosophy? 

There are a few things I think that are maybe not unique but different from most places. I think it’s often the case that people get into Philosophy by reading particular philosophers. Then you realize that they don’t really specialize in that philosopher. That can be sometimes disappointing for people. Warwick is different in that we have people specializing in all kinds of different stuff. 

It’s quite unusual to have people who are focused on contemporary philosophy, the history of philosophy, lots of different parts of traditions, parts of the world and so on – parts of Europe, mainly. 

That’s one point of emphasis, I think. The other thing I think – and this is not universal – is that most of the people who work here have a high regard for the history of philosophy. 

Most philosophers in the past were either getting things right or not in the right way. Plato, Aristotle, Canne, Hume, Hegel, stuff like that. When people are doing contemporary philosophy they’re not doing it in ignorance of what’s happened. 

For example in philosophy of mind, people are interested in issues in philosophy of mind but they’re also interested in what philosophers in the past have thought about these issues. So I’d say it’s sort of historically informed – we’re looking into the future. 

We’re interested in contemporary issues and contemporary problems but we also, most of us think that you need to look at the past as well to understand what’s going on. And then for our students, I think, what we’re trying to have across all of our modules is activity. 

So, we have a theory – the same theory that Plato had 2 and a half thousand years ago – that to get better at philosophy is to do it which means speaking your mind. It also means listening to other people – this a very difficult skill to develop – most people when they’re listening, they’re not really listening. 

They’re guarding their head, waiting for their other opportunity – but in a philosophy seminar you need to actually listen to what they’re saying, think about what they’re saying and respond. What we do as professional philosophers behind closed doors is exactly the same sort of thing we do in class – we’re questioning each other. 

And that’s the sort of thing that makes philosophy a good thing to have for future prospects. There are not many people out there who are comfortable with interrogating ideas or following them to where they lead – they’ve been thinking at a sort of MPC level – they’ve got like a decision tree in their head. 

Studying at university in general does help you practice thinking a little bit deeply. 

3. This is more about the modules in particular that caught our interest. You teach the modules on feminist theory and intro to phil – could you tell us more about your thoughts – why are those modules important, and what are some of the key takeaways from those modules? 

Intro to Phil is available for students that don’t study straight philosophy – students in PPE, PPL, Philosophy and Literature, Philosophy with GSD and so on. It’s a large number of students, which means the lectures are big. Even with a lot of people in the room we try to build in activities, which means the lectures are big which makes it very fun to teach having a lot of people in the room, but even with a lot of people in the room, we do try to build in activities for people to talk with each other and read into the lecture. 

So one of the things that’s a little bit delicate is that sometimes people have done some philosophy before and sometimes people haven’t done philosophy before. Overall these programs – you don’t need to have done philosophy before. Lots of schools don’t even offer it – they don’t have the capacity to offer it.

You have to explain what philosophy is – so that’s what we try to do. We have a range of topics, we are trying to cover some of the main topics and give people the opportunity to cover a broader range of topics. We’re also trying to give people the opportunity to develop as philosophers so we have seminars where we’re expected to participate. 

When people are doing contemporary philosophy, they’re not doing it in ignorance of what’s happened. So as I mentioned, when I got into philosophy, originally I started to read Nietsche but fortunately, where I studied was very flexible. 

I continued on just because I was interested in philosophy.

We’re also trying to give people an opportunity to develop as philosophers. We have seminars where we are expecting people to participate. We have writing support – give people four essays to write so they get lots of pre-work on their writing improvement. And then the topics are ones that we think are just interesting to know about and ones that have particular relevance for PPE, PPL and philosophy students. For Phil Lit students, for example, we discuss the philosophy of art and aesthetics. We discuss whether there are any objective standards or non-subjective standards when it comes to art and I think most people instinctively knee-jerk – they think when it comes to art, it’s just a matter of taste. 

But there’s reasons to think that’s not really how people see things. So everybody says it’s all a matter of taste and then you ask them to compare music that they like.So we start to interrogate that a little bit – think a little more deeply about these artworks. 

It’s important because we want students in their second and third year to be able to have a good way of deciding where they want to socialize, how much philosophy they wanna do and which parts they wanna do. As I said earlier we cover a ton of different types of philosophy. We want our students to essentially pick which parts they want to be involved in. 

4. Could you tell us more about perhaps – the feminism module – is that a new module, are there any progressive ideas there that are worth mentioning? Also your perspective as a male professor teaching the feminism module – is that something that was significant. 

It’s called feminism because that’s a snappy title but really it’s a feminist philosophy module. It’s looking at different parts of feminist philosophy and what people have said there. The thing about feminist philosophy, like lots of different areas of philosophy, is that it’s very diverse in terms of topics studied and also the viewpoints that people have. 

So, there isn’t one thing which is feminism philosophy. And that’s reflective of the fact that feminism as a political movement has a quite clear overarching ambition: to end gender oppression. 

But how to do that has been an argument since feminism really began. You have 19th century feminists arguing about the relationship between gender and race, and these arguments continue. One of the things we get across in the course is there isn’t anything in common that feminist philosopher or feminist thinks apart from they’re always against gender oppression. 

And then we look at how thinking about gender oppression might impact traditional philosophical topics. We look at philosophy of mind – one of things we look at there is the way in which bias works, which means that we need to change how we think about philosophy of mind. 

We look at political philosophy, so we look at whether political philosophy has let women down in some sense without considering how gender class membership might make a difference to a political power and so on, so we dig into that. We also look at topics in the philosophy of language, so this week one of the things we’ve looked at is the claim that people have made that pornography – or the wide distribution of pornography and the content of that pornography actually silences women. 

The idea is supposed to be, people look at this pornography, they see what happens in it and then they take to tell the truth about how sex is supposed to work, and that interferes with how they navigate sexual encounters amongst themselves in a bad way. In a way where people’s wishes and desires are not taken seriously enough because they think that actually this is how it’s supposed to be with the pornography instead of talking to women about it or listening to sex education. 

That’s an interesting and provocative idea, and to really dig into it, you need to understand quite a lot about philosophy of language, actually. We’re thinking about speech act theory and we’re also thinking about how it is that pornography could even communicate a message because most pornography doesn’t have terribly rich verbal communication in it. 

The claim is supposed to be that it communicates a message about women so it requires a lot of unpacking to understand that. What we end up having at the end is that students write really good essays about the philosophy of language, which they might not have done if it wasn’t connected to a topic that they found interesting. So we’ve got this two way process. 

We understand a bit more about feminism, and we also understand a bit more about philosophy because we’ve attached the philosophy to something that’s interesting. It’s kind of a Mary Poppin’s principle – a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down. 

So that’s what we’re trying to do. The topics that we’ve covered are the topics that students have found interesting, where the readings are part of the discussion. We try out different topics when we run the course. In terms of me being a man and teaching the course. 

The course isn’t about us sharing our experiences of being women.

Ideally the course would be representative of the whole student body which is for the undergraduate level, slightly tilted towards the female, but we’ve got a lot of men as well. That would be the idea because gender oppression primarily impacts upon the life chances of women, but also has toxic effects for men as well. 

As I said, we’re not just sharing our experiences. Students have said to me, look, we do this in our own time. What we wanna learn about is the theory, the ideas and the arguments behind that. 

From that perspective, me being a man doesn’t seem to be tremendously relevant. Because I’m not trying to tell people what it feels like to be a woman. While there isn’t one thing it feels like to be a woman. 

It’s never really presented as an issue. Sometimes people find initially odd. I think that’s because they have a different idea of what the course is initially about. So I do try to for the first couple of weeks, kind of scare people off. This is a philosophy module. 

We’re gonna be reading texts in philosophy, gonna be looking at arguments and theories and complicated concepts. It’s not gonna be about talking about our experiences, except insofar as they relate to these ideas and arguments. 

I think once we realize that and we realize it’s feminist philosophy is an area like any other area of philosophy that can be studied in the usual way – through arguing with one another, talking with one another, which I think we will get in the end. 

5. Now to return to the previous questions, if you could give us maybe 3 of your favourite philosophers, and why they appeal to you. 

First is Martha Nussbaum – I think she’s pretty good. In the beginning of her career, she was interested in ancient philosophy, did some of her own translations. Some of those old translations of Plato and others are starting to be re-written. 

People think translations have improved since then. But it’s still a monumental thing to do. To look at some of the work of Aristotle and explain it to what an audience is. But she’s also been very influential in the development of something that’s called the capabilities approach, which has also been developed by Amartya Sen, who is an economist and philosopher we have already mentioned. 

And the idea there is what’s important in policy is to try and give people what they need to be able to have a flourishing life, if they choose to do so. We can’t enforce people to be well nutrified because perhaps they have some religious ideal where they think it’s good to not be well nutrified but what should be the case is that people have the ability to be well nutrified if they choose to. 

It’s been very influential in that development – good on John Stuart Mill, and how he sees desire as an example of what’s good in life. 

David Hume – that’s one of his abiding themes, that humanity can kind of stand on its own two feet. Third one, maybe Gottlob Frege. 

Frege was working at the end of the 19th century. A time when people were realizing that some of the things they took for granted in mathematics weren’t quite so clear cut. So the famous example is that people realized you could develop non-Euclidean geometries. That the parallel postulate was independent of the other postulates that Euclid laid down, and they developed variations of geometry. 

That led people to develop a little bit of a crisis of confidence. If even geometry could be shaken, what do we really know for sure? So what Frege was trying to do was put mathematics, and particularly analysis and arithmetic on a firm footing. 

He was trying to show you how actually maths is really a branch of applied logic. Never mind the fact that we don’t know how logic works, at least we’ve reduced one problem to two problems. Now this didn’t really work in the way he thought about it. But he’s a very good writer, very humorous in the way he dissects other views. Very dry subject but he has lots of zingers against other thinkers. 

And he kind of set the bar for clarity of exposition, explaining your assumptions, being clear about those sorts of things. So, an interesting figure and very influential on contemporary philosophy. But I’m not an expert on contemporary philosophy. Which is his main area. It’s just something I follow as a recreational interest for fun because I find it interesting. 

6. This is more like a general question – as a professor of philosophy, what is the most important lesson a student can take from studying philosophy? 

I’m not sure. I can tell you what I want to happen, but I don’t want to impose upon somebody what their aim should be. Their reasons might be different from my reasons. I’ll just say what I would like to be the case. 

I would like to be the case that more people, in the world that we’re living in, have the time and the space and the energy and the inclination to think critically about their decisions. I think the more people that there are in the world, that have the time to think about their choices, we should hopefully be able to have better choices. 

That’s kind of utopian, I don’t think that’s going to happen. But I think that studying philosophy and thinking about things might help you to make better choices about who you vote for, how you spend your time, and 

But if they don’t then that’s fine as well, they get something else out of it – that’s perfectly fine too. I think helping people to make better decisions. 

7. We looked at your PhD. There’s a branch of philosophy called meta-ethics you studied. Can you delve into it a little more? 

In ethics you would hear things like – which particular things are right and wrong? What are relevant to people and so on? 

Meta-ethics is much more abstract, much less directly connected to the rest of the world. Questions like, what does it even mean to say that something’s right? Or something’s wrong? 

Is that a mere expression of opinion? Is that an expression of a preference, or are you trying to state something factual, something objective? That’s the sort of question that I’m interested in. 

One of the reasons why it seems puzzling is that ethics doesn’t seem like a mere matter of opinion. If somebody told you that they thought that murder was okay, you would think that there’s something wrong with them. 

It doesn’t seem to be a mere imagined opinion. But it also doesn’t work in the same way an empirical one might work. If an empirical murder is wrong, that’s not something you learn by taking out your microscope and exploring the world. 

If you were to come across a group of – this is an example of something Gilbert Harmond gives, it’s a variation of you could come across young hoodlums that could set a cat on fire, so they set this cat on fire – you can pick up on – the cat’s furry, can start to smell the singing and disgusting fur smell, you can hear the cat yowling and so on. 

You form a lot of judgments about the cat. Just as quickly, just as easily, you think – and that’s wrong, that’s evil what they’ve done. In the case of the fur, we’ve got a good example of how they’ve been able to detect the furriness. 

When it comes to you detecting the wrongness, it doesn’t come to you that that’s the case – it seems that all wrong things have a particular way that they look, taste, smell, what have you. Yet, you pick up on these features just as quickly. It’s as easy for you to tell that the cat is burning than that it’s wrong. 

Even though we don’t have a good understanding of how that could be. We don’t seem to plunge into moral facts. 

So that’s what meta-ethics is all about. On the one hand it seems not just objective, but it also doesn’t seem to work as other objective matters of fact. 

So then philosophers try to puzzle that out and work out what’s going on. One group of philosophers is what I was looking at in my PhD. So in my PhD there’s a particular famous philosopher, Christine Koersgaard. 

Her view is that effectively there are correct answers to moral questions, but that’s not because there’s pre-existing moral facts, that’s because there are good processes for settling questions. 

That’s what’s important – there are procedures that settle these things for us. So that people can be wrong about moral questions but not because they’re wrong about some kind of moral independent reality. And the reason I was interested in that is it would be a nice idea if it were true. It would allow you to have the best of all worlds. 

You would have a sense of the morality that was expected. Or at least we can agree on morality without having to agree on certain entities like moral facts. So it would be nice if it were true but I think what my PhD was about was a long list of reasons why it wasn’t true. 

8. In the time since, have you come to any deeper conclusions – if you could re-write it would you change it? 

I think it was mostly alright. Don’t get me wrong, I think one of the reasons why I chose this philosopher to look at is because he chose lots of different parts of meta-ethics and when I started my PhD I didn’t know much about meta-ethics. The fact that he commented on lots of different issues – I had a reason to familiarize myself with lots of different issues. 

Since then I’ve explored further issues and different moral viewpoints like maybe Korsgaard was right in the end. Don’t get me wrong, one of the reasons why I chose this philosopher to look was is because she talks about lots of different parts of meta-ethics and when I started my PhD I didn’t know very much about meta-ethics, so the fact that she commented on lots of different parts of meta-ethics – I had a reason to go familiarize myself with a lot of those different issues.

Since then, I’ve explored further issues and different moral viewpoints such as expressivism, which is a different viewpoint from the one that she adopts, and I’ve also been supervising PhD students on sort of related topics, like objectivity in ethics or the relevance of evolution to ethics. 

Sometimes people are worried by the fact that our moral faculties have an evolutionary history that maybe we should be suspect to our moral judgements, maybe that they’re not reliable or something like that. These are the students I’ve supervised over the years, where we’ve done lots of different topics, but I’ve not changed my mind about Korsgaard’s position. 

9. As a discipline with quite ancient roots, people are still quite interested in it to this day, such that they choose to study philosophy in some form. What do you think is the role of the philosopher in the modern world?

I think being around an educated person is quite something of reflection – any discipline that you study in university – there’s usually some form in there – it’s going to be hard to get away from. The ideas that someone like John Stuart Mill worked with in the 19th century are still having an impact now and thinking about how society should be structured. 

Philosophy is one of the most influential disciplines, it’s shaped how people think, can’t really get more fundamental than that. That kind of impact takes a long time to unfold itself. But it’s also got philosophers that are interested in more contemporary problems. The idea is that people like John Stuart Mill are still having an impact now on how society should be structured. 

Society in a way is now one of the most influential disciplines. It’s shaped how the world is and how people think. You can’t really get more fundamental than that. It’s that kind of impact that takes a long time frame to unfold itself. But there are also other philosophers that are interested in more contemporary problems, what they point out is that there are a lot of contemporary problems where philosophy is part of the solution. 

It’s not the whole solution but very often it can be good to get clear on the question that you’re even asking. Balancing out different sources of evidence, and balancing out the strengths of those sources of evidence, combining them together into a complete view, is something that I think philosophy teaches as well. I teach philosophy because I think about the impact that it has on individuals to allow people the space to think for themselves. I think that’s probably the most valuable thing that we do. But I do think there is a longer term impact as well.