Why Philosophy? Alexandra Plakias

Let curiosity lead the way!

What is philosophy to you? 

Philosophy, to me, is asking questions, but not necessarily arriving at an answer. Instead, philosophy is opening up space for new ways of seeing things in the hopes of addressing or easing a worry. And while we can philosophize about almost anything, for me, the worry with which philosophy begins is the question of what we’re doing here, and how to orient ourselves in a universe devoid of meaning or purpose—how to move through a world that is fundamentally indifferent to our existence.

I realized pretty early on that I was not the most technical philosopher, coming up with big theories and formulating principles and counterexamples. This used to discourage me, but now I realize there are different ways of doing good philosophy. I think the thing I am good at, then, is coming up with questions and looking for the answers in interesting or unexpected places. I’m not always confident that I’ve gotten the answer right, but asking the question might start a worthwhile conversation. If you read enough interesting work and let curiosity lead, your idiosyncratic interests will add up to a contribution that no one else is equipped to make—and that may be of value to someone.

Alexandra Plakias

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How were you first introduced to philosophy? 

Midway through high school, I transferred to a school with an IB (International Baccalaureate) program, and when it was time to pick courses, my dad said, ‘Philosophy—you’d like that.’ Probably because he’d been debating with me at the dinner table since I was a kid, so he knew I enjoyed a good argument. Lucky for me, the philosophy teacher that year was Corey Brettschneider, an incredibly talented teacher and philosopher who is now a professor of Political Science at Brown. He had us read all the classics; that was my introduction to philosophy, and I absolutely loved it. I went into college knowing I wanted to study philosophy, and again, I had wonderful professors and mentors. And I work at my alma mater, so now I get to work with some of those same people. In particular, I had two advisors, Katheryn Doran and Marianne Janack, who are not just brilliant philosophers and fantastic teachers, but also very kind and cool women. As an undergraduate, they helped me see a future version of myself in the profession. As a PhD student, I was able to work with Liz Anderson as my dissertation chair, who was incredible and patient and encouraging—when I didn’t have confidence that my work was worth doing, I would remind myself that Liz was a whole lot smarter than me, and if she believed it was worth doing, I should get it done. And that’s how I was able to get my first paper out, even though at the time I had left grad school with a PhD and no academic job, and was working in a restaurant.

How do you practice philosophy today? 

I practice philosophy where I find the opportunities: my classes involve a lot of discussion, which sometimes sparks an idea or helps me see a connection I hadn’t appreciated before. More generally, I practice philosophy by being curious and remaining open to possibilities: I don’t always know where an idea will come from, or which reading will turn out to be the missing piece of a paper I’m working on, for example. So I try to keep things moving, while also leaving time for thinking and allowing things to come together, maybe in unexpected ways. Practically, this means leaving time to go for a walk, or maybe just sit for a few minutes and close my eyes. It’s easy to focus on being productive, and I’m guilty of that, but I try to remind my students that philosophy requires thinking, and thinking doesn’t always look like what we think being productive looks like. But of course, life also gets in the way, and there are times when a project will stall for a while, and I get frustrated. More specifically, I try to always have a few different types of projects in motion, so that when inevitably one of them stalls a bit, I can turn to something else. Or there’s the voice of the critic in my head, telling me why it won’t work before I’ve even got it down on paper. But the advantage of having been doing this for a while is, I can keep faith that it’ll be there when I come back to it; I’ve had experience with things taking longer than expected but still getting done, and that lets me be patient with myself.

What is a philosophical issue that is important to you? 

In the past, I’ve struggled to identify a question or theme that unifies my research. But looking back at what I’ve written over the last five years or so—my book Awkwardness, but also papers on whether philosophers have to believe the work they publish, and the way that relates to self-confidence—I think the through line is a kind of social uncertainty: uncertainty about ourselves, our abilities and judgments, and our place in the social world. I think this kind of insecurity and self-doubt is what drew me to philosophy in the first place- in philosophy, I found a place to take these tendencies to doubt and direct them towards something outside myself.

I also tend to jump around a little bit, topic-wise. So, I finished a book on awkwardness last year, and now I’m turning back to questions about food, which I’ve been teaching a course on since I got to Hamilton in 2014. I’m interested in how issues of food and knowledge intersect. As philosophers, we come up with these elaborate epistemological thought experiments, but what’s interesting to me is that food presents all kinds of epistemological puzzles in our everyday lives, but we don’t talk about them very much in philosophy.

What books, podcasts, or other media have stood out to you as a philosopher?

I read a lot of Wittgenstein in college. I actually wrote my undergraduate thesis on The Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough, and it’s a great piece of writing—scathing, but on point. I still sneak it into my classes where I can. Wittgenstein is not a philosopher one can emulate, but he’s someone I can turn to when I want to recapture that sense of wonder and resonance I felt encountering philosophy for the first time.

And, to break the rules a little, I want to highlight a specific blog post: Thi Nguyen on The Philosopher’s Cocoon about his approach to writing. At one point, he talks about deciding not to write boring philosophy anymore. Reading that was a breakthrough moment for me. First of all, he’s just a great writer— I love when someone’s writing voice sounds like an honest human voice, and Thi’s pieces read like someone talking to you. And then the content resonated so much with me. It seemed so obvious, but it had never occurred to me that I could just… write about something because I thought it might be interesting, or worthwhile, even if no one else had written about it or invited me to write about it. I tend to struggle with self-confidence, and it helps to read people who are doing things in their own way and succeeding brilliantly at it, even if I don’t agree with what they’re saying. I have to constantly fight the urge to look at what other people are doing and do it like that. Even doing this interview, I ended up caving and looking up what other people had said, to see if I was doing it ‘right.’ But this comes from a place of insecurity. And it helps to remind myself that the point is not to be flawless, or even to be right. I think of a line from Alan Watts, who in one of his lectures on Zen Buddhism says, “I’m not trying to convince anyone, I’m going to show you something I enjoy, and maybe you enjoy it too.” I’m just trying to show someone the way I see things, and maybe that way of seeing things works for them.

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Alexandra Plakias is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York. She is the author of Thinking Through Food: A Philosophical Introduction (Broadview, 2018) and Awkwardness (Oxford University Press, 2024). She has published papers on topics ranging from the moral psychology of disgust to the question of whether philosophers should believe what they publish. Her work has also appeared in venues such as The Washington Post, The Conversation, and Aeon.

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