Quentin Smith

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Quentin Smith is a philosopher and philosophy professor at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, Michigan. He is most well-known for his work in the philosophy of time, philosophy of language, philosophy of physics and philosophy of religion. However, Smith himself is not limited in his interests, which occasionally branch out into the philosophy of mind, metaphysics, ethics, and physical cosmology. Smith is also a painter and a poet.

Smith began his quest into philosophy at age 16 in an attempt to answer the question, "What is the meaning of life?", when he was disappointed by what he observed in the lives of other people. He originally studied and wrote in the tradition of continental philosophy, with a particular affinity for Martin Heidegger. It was said that he had read Being and Time so many times through that he found himself able to recite passages in full from memory, even recalling what page of his edition they appeared on. Later, he made the switch to analytic philosophy when he found the continental tradition unsatisfactory. However, he has never given up his belief that the topics the continentals were interested in are valid and worthy topics for philosophical analysis.

Smith has published over 100 articles; however, this is a mere fraction of what he has actually written. He is so deeply devoted to doing philosophy that he writes an exorbitant amount almost daily, much of which is never even read by anyone else, if only for the reason that once he finishes a piece, he quickly moves onto something new. It is not uncommon for Smith to simply forget to send articles for review for publishing. In fact, it is not uncommon for him to forget to send some book-manuscripts for review for publishing. Of his published books, he has authored three, co-authored two, and co-authored and edited seven. He is also the chief editor for Philo and an editor for Prometheus Books. Philosophers, young and old, from all over the world, on a regular basis send Smith their work for review. Occasionally, some physicists send him their theories for his interpretations of them. At all times, Smith has an enormous list of things to do; his style of working on a couple of dozen projects simultaneously sometimes causes problems with several works having the same deadline for completing, requiring Smith to work on over-drive as the deadline approaches. A larger issue is that he continually and spontaneously develops new ideas as he rereads his penultimate drafts, which quickly turns one paper into two new papers. Being creatively inspired is a problem, not because it is hard or infrequent to achieve, but because of the effort to turn off this natural state of "being flooded with new ideas" and do some secretarial tinkering, like writing a bibliography for his papers or chapters, which leave him exhausted from forcing himself to "close the floodgates" and not to think during this time. But leaving the flood of ideas open and unhindered and developing another new theory is no different from breathing.

There is much to be said about his personal life that provides entertaining stories of his very different and unconventional character. At the beginning of his career, he was offered jobs at a few prestigious schools, and some have said that he turned them down precisely because of their prestige. But Smith recently said:

Actually, the situation was more complex. The primary reason for my decisions is that I was then a continental philosopher, not an analytic philosopher, and the prestigious universities were analytic. A more accurate statement was that my conceptual system did not then include the distinction between prestige/non-prestige, a conceptual distinction I acquired only after being in academia for a long time. The distinction I understood in the 1970s, between (say) university A and university B, was that university B was analytic, but university A had philosophers who were good continental philosophers, or worked in certain areas of continental philosophy that I did...One of the two analytic philosophers on the faculty, who later went to Notre Dame and studied the EPR experiments, had the usual "analytic/continental divide" at U of K but within 8 or 9 years, we were studying a similar topic, the EPR experiments. But he was interested in the EPR topic directly and I was interested in its consequences, e.g., absolute simultaneity. In the late 1980s, I had been an "independent scholar" for about 10 years, although except for a few financially supportive people at NEH, ACLS, and the Rockefeller Foundation, etc., what I called "being an independent scholar" was called something else by the rest of society. Society understood the phrase "independent scholar" to express the concept expressed by "a wandering bum who spends his time writing philosophy articles and books rather than doing something useful"--an evaluation also shared by many philosophy professors The only other person who was a philosophy professor who resigned his position to become an independent scholar is William Vallicella, who is now living in the Arizona desert writing articles and books about why the universe exists. I recall that he was the only person who could understand why I would resign to become an independent scholar and live such a life. He understood immediately, but no amount of explanation enabled many others to understand---they did not have the conceptual categories needed to understand it, just as in the 1970s I did not have the conceptual categories of prestige/non-prestige.

Smith refused to surround himself with those who were concerned with prestige, or who saw philosophizing as primarily having an instrumental value of being a means to the end of increasing one's professional status, renown or position in the academic pecking order. Instead, he took a job at a relatively unknown program where he thought he would encounter "real" philosophers. But he grew disappointed even there, quit the job, and wandered himself onto a lonely beach somewhere in South Carolina. There he lived on the beach for three months, living on mostly nuts and water, contemplating the ocean, the sky, existence, the meaning of life, and the meaning of the world-whole. He was urged to leave by a hurricane that hit the beach; he escaped it on foot, for 12 miles. But he now emphasizes that generalizing about the motives of philosophy professors tends to be inaccurate due to the many individual differences between one person and another. Besides, he adds, interest in philosophy or social prestige are matters of degree, not an "all one" or "all the other" psychological disposition. Quoting Smith's current views:

"Prestige" is not the most precise word, since it does not make clear the positive normative implications. Viewing prestige as a negative value is a mistaken normative belief--Aristotle rightly said that "honor" is a positive value if subordinated to the desire for knowledge, since it is good (not bad!) that people be appreciated or "honored" for their achievements. Regarding prestigious universities, knowing the individual philosophers in these departments confirms one expectations: philosophers are there because of their achievements and that "honor" in Aristotle's sense is a natural consequence of that. Humans are social animals and pursuit of significant achievement in philosophy includes three motives: (1) a desire to know for its own sake, (2) an altruistic desire to communicate one's results to others, given that one's results may be helpful to some as other philosophers' publications have been helpful to oneself and (3) a desire to be honored for achieving something that objectively deserves to be honored (or appreciated). To find any negative value, one needs to find additional categories of motives. The motive that is relevant to a negative evaluation of someone's pursuit of prestige is that the person not be motivated by (4), pursuing an achievement of a certain type because one knows one's subculture BELIEVES achievements of that type are objectively deserving of honor (regardless of whether their beliefs are true or false and regardless of whether achievements of that type really are deserving of honor). One is not motivated by a desire for knowledge, or altruism, or objectively merited honor, but merely to be "honored", regardless of whether it is merited or not. In philosophy, this means publishing theories that one knows will please one's peers and the perceived "authorities". In most philosophers there is a mixtures of these four motives; one can say that "pursuit of prestige" has negative value only in cases where motive (4) is stronger than all the three other motives combined. This varies from individual to individual, but there is no generalization one can make about a difference between honored ("prestigious") and less prestigious universities. Philosophers at prestigious universities are not more likely to have a strong #4 motive than philosophers at other universities. Consider two factors: philosophers at more prestigious universities spend a lot of time and effort on writing philosophy and it is virtually impossible to do that without having (1)-(3) as one's primary motivation. Second, if "honor regardless of whether it is objectively warranted or not" is one's primary desire, one will not go into the field of philosophy. Probably at most 5,000 people will read and honor one. If one wants honor, one goes into a profession where there are hundreds of thousands of people available to "honor" one, e.g., being a popular entertainer, sports figure, politician, or something of the sort. Writing philosophy is too hard and requires too much work-time for one to be able to do it based solely on a motive of being "honored regardless of whether or not it is merited". Do I have different views from some, many or all philosophers about this matter? I differ from many, but not all. The main difference is that many believe (4) is of positive value and believe other people are psychologically similar to themselves, so it appears to them that (4) is "self-evidently" the only motive for writing philosophy. But this is no so much of a difference as a difference in conceptual systems; exploring their views, one finds they do not have the categories (1)-(3)and believe the words used in expressing (1)-(3) are conventionally approved ways of talking and thus uttering these words is a means to the end of obtaining (4)."

For his students, he is a source of inspiration. He is deeply interested in questions about life and existence that so many of us as humans ask about our own lives, students tend to feel that they are gaining something very meaningful to their lives from what Smith has to teach them. But Smith's technique is geared more towards pushing the student to search him or herself for the answers to the questions; he is more interested in what the student him or herself really thinks, rather than what he or she has been taught by other philosophers. While he does teach his own views and theories in most of his courses, he pushes students to criticize and argue against him; if no one does, it is not uncommon for him to provide them with some opposing theories. Essentially, Smith is genuinely interested in the quest for truth and wisdom, and he is ready and willing to learn from his students should they provide some insight that he did not have.

If one desires to get to know Quentin Smith, he suggests reading his philosophical works, his poetry, and contemplating his paintings, for he claims that 95% of who he is, is in his works, and only about 5% is present during interaction with him. While most people tend to think that he is a bit strange, he doesn't think about his behavior in terms of conventional/unconventional distinctions. He recently said:

"It is interesting that a few philosophers think that being a philosopher in the way I am is "strange" or "eccentric", considering that this is precisely what society as a whole (with exceptions that do not extend much beyond one part of academia) thinks of all philosophy professors. Society in general believes that anybody whose career is being "a philosopher" is not only strange, eccentric, beyond comprehension, but must also be crazy. Spending one's living thinking about, writing about, teaching about, metaphysics, or ethics, etc. is a sure sign the person is highly eccentric and crazy in some way that we [ society] cannot understand and do not want to understand. Practically the only way to get a "normal member of society" [even though the only thing common to each human is that none of them are 'normal'] to think a philosophy professor is not eccentric and crazy is to tell them that a philosophy is somebody who teaches students how to think more clearly when they are making business decisions about the best way to increase the company's profits. Other examples won't work; e.g., thinking more clearly about who to vote for in politics is not sufficient since voting occurs too rarely; think clearly about news media reports doesn't work, since society takes for granted that news media reports "by definition" are biased towards this or that viewpoint and that "news" is not an area where clear thinking (as opposed to persuasive rhetoric) is relevant. So if people who are so strange and eccentric as to become philosophy professors think I am strange and eccentric, that implies I am not strange and eccentric. In fact, I might be the only philosophy professor who is not strange and eccentric, and society might agree with me if I (hypothetically) "explained" that make my purpose is to help students think more clearly about how to make more money."

About conventionality/nonconventionality, he says: "This distinction is of most interest to people in their teens and early twenties; beyond that age, one has interacted with enough different people, and been in enough different environments, to realize that this distinction does not exist. Insofar as it exists, it is relevant to a sociologists examining different cultures and their different conventions, and it is relevant to younger people who find they differ from most of society, but haven't yet figured out an individual purpose, self-identity or a way to relate to society, and, during this formative process, identity is most clearly understood in general categories, such as conventional vs. unconventional people. But no matter what purpose one chooses, e.g. living on top of a tree and preaching a religion one has just invented, once one's self-identity has been formed in a specific and satisfactory way (to oneself), and once one is involved in a purpose (or "career") one is satisfied with, and one has developed one's preferred way of fitting into sciety, and once one has enough confidence in one's self-identity and chosen purpose, then what one sees are individuals, each of which has her own individual purpose and self-identity and each differs purpose/self-identity from that of another. Apart from sociology, anthropology and similar fields, the conventional/unconventional distinction does not have a non-vague meaning; for example, any attempt to explain the distinction in a non-vague way will be found by others quite easy to immediately "refute"."

But Smith agreed with some earlier beliefs, but suggested that they might not survive an exact analysis. Some earlier beliefs he expressed were that it is best to act in certain conventional ways if acting otherwise would be discomforting to others, but with limits of course: --if writing philosophy is too unconventional for certain environments (mainly non-academic environments), he would rather live on a beach than stop writing philosophy. He believes that conventions taken for granted in any given culture are worthy of questioning. Given the thousands of different cultures and the different factual beliefs and moral beliefs that were unreflectively taken for granted by members of these different cultures, it would be a rather remarkable and improbable coincidence if the beliefs "WE" take for granted are the obviously right ones and the other beliefs obviously wrong (because different from ours). It is often thought that he is "off in his own world" or "out there" most of the time; however, he pays attention to much more than most people realize, and while he may not remember your name or what you look like, he will remember what you said with the utmost detail. About himself, he admits that he is "challenged in practical matters," but grants the truth of the remarks of those who associate with him the most that "lack of interest in everyday practical matters" may well be a more accurate explanation.

[edit] Published books

Epistemology: New Essays (editor) Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006
Einstein, Relativity and Absolute Simultaneity. Routledge October 2006
Time, Tense and Reference (co-edited with A. Jokic, and contributing author). Cambridge Mass. MIT Press, October 2003.
The Felt Meanings of the World. Second Edition with Added Material. Purdue University Press, West Lafeyette, Indiana, 2007. (First edition, 1986).
Consciousness: New Philosophical Perspectives (co-edited with A. Jokic, and contributing author). Oxford: Oxford University Press, January 2003.
Ethical and Religious Thought in Analytic Philosophy of Language. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997. Pp. 264.
Time, Change and Freedom. (co-authored with L. Nathan Oaklander). New York: Routledge, 1995. Pp. 218.
The New Theory of Time. (co-authored and co-edited with L. Nathan Oaklander). New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994. Pp. 378.
Theism, Atheism and Big Bang Cosmology. (co-authored with William Lane Craig). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. Pp. 357.
Language and Time. First Edition. New York. Oxford University Press. 1993. pp. 259.
The Felt Meanings of the World: A Metaphysics of Feeling. Purdue University Press :West Lafayette, 1986.