Commencement addresses

Ms. Jennifer Page, 2008
Ms. Julia Ong, 2008
Dr. Don Howard, 2007
Mr. Vaughn Blackman, 2007
Dr. Tian Yu Cao, 2006
Ms. Jennifer Sichel, 2006
Mr. Steven Karbank, 2005
Mr. Jared Miller, 2005
Dr. Peter Schwartz, 2004
Mr. Brad Berman, 2004
Dr. Leroy Rouner, 2003
Ms. Dasha Polzik, 2003
Mr. Greg Charak, 2002

Commencement Address delivered by Ms. Jennifer Page (GRS '06)
School of Management Auditorium, Boston University, May 18, 2008

Philosophy made me concerned with justice, and with the just city.
Philosophy made me concerned with the coincidence of thinking and doing.

I’m really intimidated by the idea of having to talk about philosophy in front of this audience.  I only know that I don’t know that much.  And I’m not trying to feign Socratic humility in order to ingratiate myself to the all of you.  This is really frightening for me, I swear.

But it helps that you’re all very well-behaved right now.  All I had to do was stand up here and everyone got really quiet.  Having spent the past two years teaching third graders in South Dakota, this is quite weird.

I was invited to speak today because, as Professor Garrett informed me, I’m the only one who’s graduated from the department in the past 17 years who has a job.
That’s a lie.  I’m sure that many of the gainfully employed resident philosophers at Microsoft are BU alumni. 

In truth, I don’t know why I was invited to speak here today, but I’m honored to do it.  Thank you for having me.

During one of those early May South Dakota blizzards, I was reading War and Peace (because what else do you do during those early May South Dakota blizzards?), and I happened upon Tolstoy’s description of the German military advisor Pfuel:

Pfuel was one of those theorists who love their theory so dearly they lose sight of the aim of all theory, which is to work out in practice.  He was so much in love with theory that he hated all practice and didn’t want to know about it.  He positively rejoiced in failure because failure was due to practical infringements of his theory, which went to show how right the theory was.

I’m not going to lie.  For much of my time at Boston University, I was a disgruntled philosophy major.  Sure, I loved the professors, the classes, the conversations…  My beef was with the philosophers.  Philosophers!  Overgrown children, exultant in their own ability to fixate on a singular concept—synthesis, sympathy, the primacy of language, the self-understanding of reason for the sake of critique—and explain away all phenomena in terms of it. Theory and ideas, ideas and theory— What about what the theories and ideas purport to describe?  What about reality?

As a student of philosophy, I divided the figures that I came across into categories.  There were exactly two: a given philosopher was either a kindred spirit or an idiot.  It’s obvious to most that the world is not a perfect place.  Kindred spirits were those philosophers who consider it one’s responsibility to change things, to make things better.  Idiots have their heads in the clouds and fall in wells.  I was attracted to Marxism not so much because I was enamored by Lenin’s policy regarding enemies of the State, but because the Communists actually did something. 

Let me share my own theory to practice narrative.  I became a teacher due to my hatred of bottled water.  Bottled water epitomized the dumb credulity of the snobbish American bourgeoisie, too arrogant to drink from a public fountain, too shortsighted to see the long-term environmental repercussions of laying to rest ten trillion one-use containers, too stupid to see through the hoodwinker of an ad campaign which promises to improve one’s social standing if you’re seen holding a Deja Blue.

How did we Americans get to be so materialistic? I asked myself.

Lucky for me, I was taking a political philosophy class.  There I encountered Althusser, a 20th century French Marxist.  He had a concrete answer to my rhetorical question: CAPITALISM.

I was satisfied.  But I then wondered, why are we so unenlightened as to not eradicate the disease that has made us indolent, ignorant, and diabetic?  Althusser knew that one too: IDEOLOGY.  Ideological state apparatuses were Althusser’s elaboration on a Marxist concept, and able to account for the systemic and unconscious reproduction of the ideological status quo.  Schools are the most important of the ideological state apparatuses, because education is the primary form of imbuing the capitalist ideology into the next generation.  To Althusser, schools train us to have material interests, and prepare us for the jobs that will finance those interests.  Furthermore, the stratification of society is built into schools, whose shiny posters of doctors and lawyers and the words “Follow Your Dreams” cover up the stark reality that children from working class homes are educated at inferior schools and are lucky to eventually attend the local vo-tech, where suburban kids get a 4:1 student to guidance counselor ratio and are applying for medical school at age 13.  School teaches you your place in society, what you may aspire to, and gives you skills for no more than that.

This is a caricature of Althusser, and a caricature of the American public education system, but to a nineteen-year-old girl who really, really hated bottled water, to make such sweeping generalizations proved extremely satisfying.

Neo-Marxist thought gave me published ammunition for my various grievances with American consumer culture.  But, it also got me thinking about a cause more worth my while—namely, class disparity in so-called democratic nations.  Now, I’ve read too many dystopist sci-fi novels to become an advocate of the centrally-planned socialistic dictatorship, or to think that communism could be anything but that in practice.  However, I took the Neo-Marxist critique seriously.  Democracy, if it was to be anything more than a word, would have to actively promote equality of opportunity.

How could democracy actively promote equality of opportunity?  If inequitable schools are fundamental in perpetuating class disparity, then equitable schools….

The gap between the education of the rich and poor in this country began to vex me more than bottled water.  And so, after completing a ranting thesis on Thomas Hobbes, the American education system, Plato, Aristotle, capitalism, utilitarianism, the American Dream, the meaning of life, and I-don’t-even-know-what-else, I signed up for Teach For America, which lets America’s young and idealistic teach in a low-income area for two years even if they’re not education majors.  Sweet deal.  Now I could finally live out what I saw as Karl Marx’s challenge to me personally in his Theses on Feuerbach, were he says (roughly): THE PHILOSOPHER JUST LOOKS AT THE WORLD.  THE POINT IS TO CHANGE IT.

I was placed in South Dakota.  This was fine by me, since I’d never been there.  I underwent a five week training in Houston, where I was taught how to teach, and moved to St. Francis, a community of 400 on the Rosebud Sioux Indian Reservation.  I got my own trailer—delightfully un-bourgeois—and was living the dream.  What could be more grassroots, for someone who cares passionately about educational justice, than to become a real, live, third grade teacher? I’ve been at the job for two years.  Karl, I have yet to change the world. 

Education, it turns out, is bigger than one teacher.  I have a curriculum, which I’m supposed to follow (and sometimes I do).  My classroom is micromanaged by my principal, the principal by the superintendent, the superintendent by the South Dakota Department of Education, and the South Dakota Department of Education by U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings.  All this would be fine, except—there is no underlying philosophy driving education in this country.  The official mission statement of my school is: “to facilitate the best academic and cultural education with the highest expectations for our student and their families.”  That’s slightly more specific than that of the U.S. Education Department.  As epitomized by the platitudinous egalitarian language of the No Child Left Behind Act, which demands educational excellence for all without defining it, there seems to be a lack of concern as to what education is.

Let me give you some of the history behind this confusion.  In the early 1900s, it was faddish among intellectuals and reformers to consider public schools a vehicle of social engineering.  Truly democratic schools churned out individuals fit for participation in a democratic society.  Since a democratic society consists of a diverse citizenry working towards the common good, schools served as sorting mechanisms whose task was to ensure that all professions needed to make society function would be provided with a sufficient number of newly trained workers each year.  Leaders of what came to be known as the social utility movement feared that future workers would err in choosing a profession due to a wrong assessment of their mental and technical skill-potential, and pushed to organize students according to ability at the youngest possible age.

Progressive school reformers eventually dropped the language of social utility; the affinity with eugenicist intelligence testing movements was becoming too problematic.  The next big thing in education was the child-centered movement (which, as its name implies, centers classroom instruction on the needs of an individual child, thus giving the likes of the other third grade teacher at my school a justification for playing Free Cell on her school-issued laptop while her students run around all day).  The child-centered movement was followed by the accountability movement, and this brings us to present.

To say that the child-centered movement replaced the social utility movement or the accountability movement replaced the child-centered movement would be an oversimplification.  The prevailing wisdom touted by educational experts doesn’t translate seamlessly into actual practices at the level of the school administration and the classroom.  With the exception of specialty schools, whose explicit purpose is a full-fledged adoption of some particular educational credo or trend, most public schools are a patchwork quilt of various theories, commercial curriculums, and the personal beliefs of educators who work there.  All this is to say—public education in America isn’t anything; the conversation isn’t being had.
The difference between where I teach and your typical suburban school are the PTAs and mandatory SAT Prep classes that disguise this reality.  Fatal to both are the uninspired Basil curriculums, the focus on teaching comprehension strategies using tedious texts that aren’t even worth comprehending.  Most kids in my district drop out of school by age 18.  To do so lacks the stigma found in suburban communities, but I’m convinced that if the option suddenly became socially acceptable, the drop-out rate there would skyrocket.  It’s been said before—teaching isn’t the same as educating.  The latter implies a change in the student.  I am certain that in spite of all the socio-economic challenges inherent to a free-lunch school, if only its educators were united by an understanding as to what education is, my school would not be a failing one.

This is a call to action.  A call to theoretical action.

I humble myself before you, philosophers, because I was wrong to be so dismissive of theory.  Practice needs theory.  Theory gives practice a reason, a direction, telos.  As I’ve learned, the world of practical action needs more thinking, more dialogue braving the deepest questions of the human experience.  When we talk about educational reform, we are asking, How can education be better? and stop there.  We are not asking the questions that antecede this one.  We are not asking: What is education?  What is the purpose of education?  We are not asking: What can society be?  What can a human being be?  We are not asking: What is society?  What is a human being?

I told you that I became a teacher due to my hatred of bottled water.  I don’t want to know how bad that retrodictive causal proposition made you logic folks cringe.  I will revise.  I became a teacher because I was obsessed with the relationship between education and society.  I was obsessed with the potential of education to save the world, or—and never concertedly—to bring about its ruin.  After all, in most democratic countries, the most malleable of the world’s citizens are handed over to governments for six or eight or ten hours per day.  Thanks to truancy laws, the process of socialization occurs primarily in schools.  Even when not in session, what goes on in schools carries over to other spheres.  Schools have the potential to be dangerous.  Why does this go unnoticed?  Because public education is a free babysitting service for parents with jobs.  And anyway, who can refuse what is billed as a basic human right?

I remain convinced that contemporary society—with happiness as a consumable good, with the cultural amnesia of the Myspace generation—is the product of its schools.  In these schools, we have been trained to value knowledge as a means to a material end, and never for its own sake.  “Learn a lot, get smart, and you’ll get a good job.  Get a good job, and you’ll make a lot of money!” my guidance counselor told those of us who demanded an explanation for all this education, all this hard work.  We were never shown what education could be, a transformative experience where we would emerge critical thinkers, reflective, bold, and active citizens of the world. 

We were educated by bunch of people who never themselves had an education.
This is not a public policy problem, but a philosophical problem.  A very, very important philosophical problem.

Okay, I wasn’t going to talk about Plato’s Republic because everyone in here has written seven term papers on it, and everyone up front has published at least three critical studies of the work, but I have to.  It’s just too relevant.

Plato’s Republic is about the best city and about the human soul.  It’s about the possibility of harmony between the two.

Plato’s Republic is about the education—that is, the transformation—of the next generation, about how it alone has the potential to create harmony in an unjust and inharmonious world, a world where most people don’t even know what justice or harmony is.
Plato’s Republic is about the about the sheer impossibility of practically implementing a system of mass education even remotely aligned to its theoretical intentions.  After all, only philosophers understand education, but philosophers do not hold political power.  Those who hold political power are responsible for education, but they do not understand it.  Philosophers will never hold political power unless they educate the populace to accept the notion of the philosopher-king, and philosophers will never have the opportunity to educate the populace unless they hold political power. 

And as Socrates says to Glaucon: “Until political power and philosophy entirely coincide, while the many natures who at present pursue either one exclusively are forcibly prevented from doing so, cities will have no rest from evils, Glaucon, nor, I think, will the human race.”
Following Plato, the just city can be theorized about, but is impossible to realize in practice.  The just city will never be more than an idea.

However, Plato’s understanding of political power is perhaps too simplistic.  To Michel Foucault, power is not just a political authority directly acting on subjects—a one-way channel.  Power pervades the social order at all levels because it comes from everything belonging to this social order.  In more concrete terms, power emanates from the media, businesses, academia, hospitals, and the everyday actions of citizens.

Again, from Republic, comes the insight: public education (the right kind) could close the gap between the actual and the ideal, both in the city and in the human soul, but the insurmountable divide between theory and practice prevents this from ever happening in real time.  But, if we follow Foucault, it is not necessary for philosophers to take political power, to rule.  Sovereignty and power are not synonymous.  Power comes from places besides the throne.  So, what is necessary is that philosophers concern themselves with the issues that are thought to belong to the realm of the polis.  In their concern with political things, philosophers are exercising political power.

Pure reason has already been critiqued, human nature has already been treatised, and the human spirit has already been phenomenologized.  To merely study philosophy, to talk about it behind closed doors with like-minded philosophical friends, to write pedantically about interpretation and interpretation of interpretation is not doing philosophy.  Right now, philosophy often treats philosophy like an ancient science to be studied for sentimental purposes, to be remembered only so it is not forgotten.  Philosophy is not a Glass Bead game.  Reject that understanding.

The guardians are not allowed to just philosophize.  They must take turns ruling the city.  I understand this as—philosophy needs to inform practice, what you do.   And if philosophy is what you do, let that be a practice, and not just idle talk about theory.  Let your conversation be heard, and let it be an important one.

Today is Commencement.  It’s one of those weighty days—a day for introspection (as well as Bacchanalian-inspired celebration…perhaps both can be combined).  For some of you, this is the end of your formal education.  I am not without an agenda in mentioning this.  I ask that you reflect on that education—not just on your college years, but go as far back as preschool, and then think forward: elementary school, junior high, high school.  Think about what you were taught, both explicitly and tacitly, and how this shaped your character, your views, and your dreams.  Think about the system for educating the young in this country and others.  When you think you’re done, continue to think.

You might be sick of thinking about education, after having been subjected to one for the past seventeen-plus years.  Blame the gadfly who charges you with upbringing of the upcoming generation.  Only philosophers can define what a transformative education consists of particular to their time and place—a whole curriculum for Athens is laid out in Republic.  Right now, a volatile debate concerning the renewal of No Child Left Behind is going on.  The debate is being conducted among politicians, journalists, lobbyists, and textbook tycoons.  Where are the philosophers?

For the past two years, while teaching fractions and phonics and supervising kickball at recess, I have not been able to get the idea out of my head that societal change must start with rethinking the education system in which society initiates its new members, and that only philosophy can do this rethinking.  Philosophy has a unique history of understanding the rapport between society at large and its educational institutions.  It has the patience to think about education, to think about society, and to advocate meaningful change.  It has the audacity to make judgments about ends in an age of relativism, to speak about the salvation of the human race.  It has self-assuredness to use language from another age.

You come out of this school a philosopher, and that’s a political responsibility.  Although I hate to instrumentalize the only discipline which can be reasonably demonstrated as an end-in-itself, I beseech you—Use philosophy.  Whatever your interpretation of Republic, you have thought about justice in a deep way, and this qualifies you to think about contemporary society in a deep way.  So—think about it.  Think about it all the time.  Obsess over it.  Write about it.  Do things.  Change things.

THE PHILOSOPHER JUST LOOKS AT THE WORLD—
Change that.

Back to Top

Commencement Address delivered by Ms. Julia Ong (CAS, '08)
School of Management Auditorium, Boston University, May 18, 2008

Distinguished faculty and staff, family, friends, and fellow classmates of the graduating class of 2008, welcome. I would like to thank you all for giving me the privilege to stand here before you today and be apart of this ceremonious event. Most importantly, I would like to thank my parents, who are attending their fourth and final college commencement ceremony. Without their unending support and belief in me I would not be standing here before you all. So thank you Mom and Dad.

Four years ago, I was standing before a similar audience: my high school graduating class of 2004. I stood before them and spoke about passions and dreams and spoke about following those dreams passionately. About making a difference. About changing the world. And as I entered Boston University, as an eager freshman with that mindset, I was ready to make a mark within this large community. I saw college as a new arena to do what I hadn’t done in high school. I wanted to do it big the second time around. To sign up for every club, for every charitable organization, for student government, for the dean’s host. I wanted to be active in any and every way possible. But as we all learned in high school, and certainly again in college, you can’t do it all.

So as I sat down to write this speech, for this graduating class of collegiate scholars, I felt less of a need to speak so grandly. After four years here at Boston University, studying in the College of Arts and Sciences, exploring different subjects and finding one field that enticed me, I’ve realized you can’t attain the big things without understanding the smaller ones first. Without cherishing them first.

Upon commencement, there are many people eager to give us advice and remind us that we are the future generation. We have a duty, a responsibility to use our education as a tool for change and progress. I firmly believe that. I still believe we can make a difference and we can change the world and that the world needs us. However, it’s not the same belief I once spouted four years ago. It isn’t about touching the entire world in a dramatic fashion. Instead, it’s about making a difference within our communities, within our relationships, within ourselves. It’s about remembering always where we’ve come from to understand how far we’ve come. It’s about acknowledging and giving credit to those who’ve helped us come as far as we have

I think about the poem I read by the American slam poet, Taylor Mali, entitled “What a Teacher Makes.” In the poem, the people are at a dinner party and one pompous guy says, “What’s a kid going to learn from someone who decided his best option in life was to become a teacher?” And then asks the teacher at the dinner table, “I mean, you’re a teacher, Taylor,” he says. “Be honest. What do you make?” The teacher responds with these words:

"I make kids work harder than they ever thought they could. I can make a C+ feel like a Congressional medal of honor and an A- feel like a slap in the face. How dare you waste my time with anything less than your very best.

I make kids sit through 40 minutes of study hall in absolute silence. No, you may not work in groups. No, you may not ask a question. Why won’t I let you get a drink of water? Because you’re not thirsty, you’re bored, that’s why.

I make parents tremble in fear when I call home; I make parents see their children for who they are and what they can be.

You want to know what I make?
I make kids wonder,
I make them question.
I make them criticize.
I make them apologize and mean it.
I make them write.
I make them read, read, read.
I make them spell definitely beautiful, definitely beautiful, definitely beautiful over and over and over again until they will never misspell either one of those words again.
I make them show all their work in math.
And hide it on their final drafts in English.
Let me break it down for you, so you know what I say is true:
I make a goddamn difference! What about you?"

I want us to remember to never become the pompous person at the dinner table. To remember our professors, our advisors, our mentors, to remember those who taught us something valuable, whether big or small, in life. And then I want us to strive to be one of them. Not necessarily a teacher in academia. But a teacher in life, a teacher for someone.

We’ve all been blessed with the opportunity to graduate from a distinguished university and learn from the best. But what we have been blessed with will mean little if we don’t use our knowledge valuably. As we step out of college, and continue on with our lives, searching for jobs, searching for what to do with our liberal arts degrees, searching for some sort of purpose, I want us to remember that it’s not simply about the big dream. That isn’t to say, don’t have a dream. Do. Dream. Dream big. But remember that it’s always about the process in between. It’s about the minor accomplishments that total our passions.

It’s about the time when I performed my own choreography for a live audience of 250 people. It’s about the time when my freshmen mentee called me up when she broke her leg, knowing that I would be able to help her. It’s about the time when I stood before seventeen of my classmates and delivered a speech that moved me, and some of them to tears. It’s about the time when I stopped by office hours to ask for help and ended up discovering more about the remarkable man across from me than the significance behind the Allegory of the Cave in Plato’s Republic. 

It’s about the discovery that occurs along the journey that matters most. And with that, I ask of you all to be open to this discovery and to go after those small, but substantial, accomplishments with as much gusto as you do for the big dream. 

Congratulations and best of luck Class of 2008! 

Back to Top

Commencement Address delivered by Dr. Don Howard (CLA '69)
School of Management Auditorium, Boston University, May 20, 2007

Distinguished faculty and Chairman, graduates, families and friends, it is a pleasure and an honor to be here.

Graduates, I know this has been a long day for you but as Nietzsche said “That which does not kill us makes us stronger”.  After this day and four years of university, you are looking very strong!  I have but a few moments to try to pass on to you the perspectives of a lifetime.  Instead of giving you answers, I am going to ask you questions.  This, you might say, is your final exam.

The lightning bolt of awareness struck when I was 15 years old.  It was a sunny beautiful day in the summer of 1963.  I was walking alone, when, as in the words of William Butler Yeats, “All changed, changed utterly:  A terrible beauty is born”.  It was at that moment I became a truly conscious being, aware of my awareness.  Thus began my quest for answers.  It was many years before I realized that finding truth in life is less about finding the right answers, than about asking the right questions.

I began my studies at Boston University majoring in biology, hoping to go to medical school.  The summer after my freshman year, I met a senior Philosophy major whose intellect and knowledge fascinated me, and inspired me to change my major to Philosophy.  My father asked me what I was going to do to support myself with my degree in Philosophy (sound familiar parents?).  I told him, “Go to medical school”.  He laughed.  I was not wealthy.  On the contrary, I was living what I nobly told myself was an existential existence.  I was hungry and homeless that first summer, sleeping in the back of other people’s cars.  Working two jobs year round, I earned my way through this University.  My degree in Philosophy, a medical degree, a Ph.D. in science, a career in academics, medicine and business, five children and eight grandchildren later, I am here giving this address.

As an undergraduate, I believed that by studying Philosophy I would find answers to the ultimate questions of the Universe.  As a doctoral student I began to understand the importance of questions.   As graduate students in science we would never ask ourselves “What is the answer?”  We would simply design an experiment to give us the answer.  The question begets the answer. 

In physics, there are theories which explain the macro-cosmos (Einstein’s theory of relativity), and theories which explain the micro-cosmos (quantum mechanics).  There are even theories which attempt to reconcile the mutual incompatibility of these.  Physicists call it “String Theory”.  There is also a concept beyond string theory, known in Physics as the “Theory of Everything”.  As a student I wanted to find the philosophical equivalent of the scientific “Theory of Everything”.  The Greek philosopher Heraclitus said, “The hidden harmony is stronger than the visible.”  I was searching for the hidden harmony.  What I found instead were questions.  I would like to share with you some of the questions I have posed to myself over the years.  Of the hundreds and perhaps thousands of worthy questions, I have chosen just five.
                                         
First question:  Is there a God?  I believe so, despite being an existentialist as a young student.  And if God exists, does God really care whether we worship as a Christian, Jew, Sunni Muslim, Shiite Muslim, Hindu or Buddhist?  I think not.  If I were God I would be too busy with “Everything” to care whether I was approached from the left or right.

Second question:  What is our responsibility to the world, to humanity?  War, suffering, disease, poverty, ignorance, climate change are desperate problems which desperately require solutions.  It is said that “No snowflake ever feels responsible in an avalanche”.  But an avalanche changes all in its path.  If we are but snowflakes in this large world, together we can effect change.  To do so we must take responsibility for our lives and commit a portion of our life’s energy to the service of humankind.  To quote Thomas Huxley “The great end of life is not knowledge, but action”.  Graduates, take action.  Change the world! 

Third question:  What does it mean to be a nation, an American?  This, in part, is a question pitting probability against possibility.  What we are, whether black or white, male or female, born rich or born poor is determined by chance, by probability.  But who we are, who we become, what we make of our lives is what is possible.  We cannot control probability, but possibility depends on many things – freedom, democracy, equality, stability, opportunity.  These are American values.  They are worth nurturing, supporting, and if necessary defending, for without these the possible only becomes the probable.  Whether you are a democrat, republican or politically independent, separate your duty and responsibility to maintain the values of this great country, from the politics which seek to corrupt it.  Look around you in this hall, or on any day in this wonderful city of Boston, at people from all over the world - Americans.  Look at the shapes, sizes, colors, religions and ethnic origins.  To hate America is to hate the whole world.  To love the best of American values is to love humankind.

Fourth question:  What is really important in life?  Consider two – family and community.  A sense of belonging is an essential part of the human experience.  Time travel is not impossible, not in a metaphysical sense.  We travel into the past through observations of the world, the study of history, and our memory.  We travel into the future, by way of influence - the lives we touch, the children we raise, the friends we help, and the deeds that we do for our human community.  Do you want to travel far into the future?  Then I submit, place the emphasis of your life here.

Make the earth a better place for you having been here.  Financial security is very important to most of us.  But money should not come at the expense of integrity.  Our choices determine who we are and we can always choose to do the right thing.  I often ask myself when I am at the last moments of my life, alone, with only my thoughts as companions, which of these (thoughts) will be my last company.  Surely they will not be the great business deals I pulled off, or the money I made in the stock market, or the fast cars I drove.  My last thoughts will be of the people I have known and loved and who have loved me, those I have helped or those who have helped me.  They will be of the goodness I have encountered, or created, in this world.  They will be of the beauty of the earth, the wonder of music, and the magic of life.  Honor is a gift that one gives to oneself.  Give yourself that gift and give your gift to the world.

My last question:  Who am I and by extension who are we?  I am a sentient, aware, conscious, creative, moral being, with free will and a conscience.  These separate me from all other things in the world and connect me with all human beings in the world.  Pablo Neruda said that “Every casual encounter is an appointment”.   Today, my appointment is with you.

Forty years ago I began my studies in Philosophy, here at B.U., a poor and struggling student.  A few years later I was sitting where you are now, graduating from this great university with my degree in Philosophy.  Now, with almost a lifetime gone, I am here, giving your commencement speech.  Life, each and every moment an unrepeatable miracle, and isn’t it over in a blink.

Congratulations graduates, this is your moment.  Some day, one of you might be giving this address.  What questions would you ask?  Remember, as you go forth into the world and ask your questions, the words of the Little Prince, “It is with the heart one sees clearly, what is essential is invisible to the eye."

Back to Top

Commencement Address delivered by Mr. Vaughn Blackman (CAS ’07)
School of Management Auditorium, Boston University, May 20, 2007

To begin with, I would like to thank the Department for this opportunity.  I would also like to thank the professors and my fellow graduates for providing a stimulating learning environment and a wonderful 4 years of philosophical inquiry.  And finally, I would like to thank all the parents for supporting us in our decision to pursue philosophy, even though it may not be the most financially rewarding major. 

You know it’s strange: philosophy seems to have a bad reputation among many people.  For example, just a week ago my roommate asked me “why would anyone choose to study philosophy”?  He went on to say that it was a useless major and that it doesn’t really teach you anything.  And while he does have a point that philosophy does not give concrete answers, this does not make it useless.  Philosophy has helped us learn to question the world around us, to think for ourselves, and to grow as human beings.  As a British psychologist once said, “In philosophy, it is not the attainment of the goal that matters, it is the things that are met along the way”.

And along the way we have found philosophy to be an interesting, exciting, and challenging area of study.  For many of us, such as myself, we sat in our first class and thought, wow this is great stuff.  Many of the issues discussed in class were in some sense already in our heads.  Yet, it was only in class that these issues were brought to life and discussed in greater depth than we could ever imagine as mere freshmen.  My first philosophy course happened to be Introduction to Ethics.  From Aristotle’s notion of virtue, to Kant’s categorical imperative, to Utilitarianism, it was truly an enlightening experience.  I quickly began to examine my everyday actions according to these theories, and was always eager to discuss them with friends.  I think in a sense we all began to do this.  We found ourselves wondering what would Spinoza say, or what would Nietzsche say.  And the more we studied the views of great philosophers, and the more we questioned those views, the better we were able to develop our own ideas and the more we fell in love with philosophy. 

And this is what I believe we all have in common. We all chose philosophy because it is our passion.  Whether it be the teachings of the ancient Greeks, the empiricists, the rationalists, or any other field of the subject, we discovered something we found interesting and worthwhile.  There were those magic nights where things started to click and we felt as though we came to know some all-important truth.  Only the very next day in class, when we proudly raised our hand to proclaim our insight, we were politely offered a counter-argument which we had not considered.  Yet there were many times that we were right, and this helped increase our thirst to learn.  As a result, there were probably nights where we were a little too “into” philosophy.  Like at that Frat party on a Friday night when we began to question whether the beer in our cup really exists. 

Now as we progress into the next stage of our lives, into the “real world” we must always remember to keep the important things at the forefront of our lives.  Things such as our family and friends, many of whom have traveled many miles to be here, to celebrate this great achievement with us.  And of course, important things such as our passions in life.  Let us not forget that we took 4 years of our lives to pursue philosophy because it is what we were passionate about.  And while many of us will likely not pursue philosophy to the same extent in the future, we must continue to pursue what moves us, what challenges us and what inspires us.  For as Hegel put it, “Nothing great in the world has ever been accomplished without passion”.

As we go through our day-to-day routines, it is easy to brush aside what’s important in life.  So whenever you feel like this is taking place, I hope you will remember the story which I’m about to narrate.  This is a story a friend recently shared with me, which can actually be found online--so I apologize if anyone has already heard it.  But for those who haven’t, I believe it is worth hearing.

One day a professor stood before his philosophy class with some items in front of him. When the class began, he picked up a large, empty mayonnaise jar and filled it with golf balls.  He then asked the students if the jar was full.  They agreed that it was.

So the professor then picked up a box of pebbles and poured them into the jar.  The pebbles rolled into the open areas between the golf balls.

He then asked the students again if the jar was full.  They agreed it was.  The professor next picked up a box of sand and poured it into the jar.  Of course, the sand filled up everything else.  He asked once more if the jar was full.

The students responded with a unanimous yes.

The professor then poured 2 cups of coffee into the jar, effectively filling the empty space between the sand.

"Now," said the professor, "I want you to recognize that this jar represents your life.  The golf balls are the important things - your family, your health, your friends, your favorite passions - things that if everything else was lost, and only they remained, your life would still be full.  The pebbles also matter, although they are less important than the golf balls- they are things such as your job, your house, and your car.  The sand is everything else - the small stuff.
If you put the sand into the jar first, there is no room for the pebbles or the golf balls.  The same goes for life.  If you spend all your time and energy on the small stuff, you will never have room for the things that are important to you.  Pay attention to the things that are critical to your happiness.

Take care of the golf balls first, the things that really matter.  Set your priorities.  The rest is just sand."

Then one of the students raised her hand and asked what the coffee represented.  The professor smiled and said, "I'm glad you asked. It just goes to show you that no matter how full your life may seem, there's always room for a good cup of coffee."

Back to Top

Commencement Address delivered by Professor Tian Yu Cao
School of Management Auditorium, Boston University, May 14, 2006

Congratulations! This is wonderful time for you, for your parents, and for all of us. By now, you have learnt a lot of philosophy, have acquired vast knowledge about philosophers and philosophical systems, and have mastered the skills necessary for philosophizing. You know how to reason, how to argue, how to make a case in a rational and coherent and convincing way, how to reflect and, when it is necessary, how to be critical. Now you are ready to go to the outside world, to start your new life.

Looking at your happy faces, I feel envious. That is, I am envious of your good luck. For it reminds me of the time when I was your age. I was a philosophy major, just as you are. But I never graduated. I received a diploma from the philosophy department of Beijing University many years later, when I was already 38 years old, not because I really graduated, but only as part of “political rehabilitation.” Let me explain.

I began to get interested in philosophy in the mid-1950s, when I got to high school. At that time the official ideology in China was Marxism. But at least before 1957 when the party launched the Anti-Rightist Campaign, there was another intellectual tradition, that of the May Fourth New Culture movement started in 1919, which was characterized by the two slogans on its banner: science and democracy. Since it was officially declared that the May Fourth movement was the prelude to the rise of Communist movement in China, the tradition enjoyed some legitimacy after the 1949 takeover.

The May Fourth movement soon split into two branches. One was liberal, and emphasized liberty and individuality, and the other focused on social justice, socialism and communism. Both were manifestations of Western culture, and both vehemently fought against the Chinese traditional culture (Confucianism in particular). They also shared a high respect for science.

Soon after having entered high school, I found by reading a few books by Plato, Descartes and Russell that I had a very strong desire to know the ultimate truths of the world, and believed it was entirely possible. If I could learn and move from ancient Greek philosophy to modern to 20th century philosophy within a few months, then what could prevent me from knowing the ultimate truths of the entire world? But I had to learn mathematics and science first, because Russell frequently referred to mathematics and physics as if no ultimate truths could be known without knowing them.

In my high school years, what intrigued me the most were the questions about infinity, totality and continuity. I could not imagine a finite universe. If it is finite, then what would be outside of its boundary — and something must exist on both sides of a boundary! — would still be part of the universe.  But I had heard the name of Einstein, who claimed that the universe was finite. How could that be possible? It was mysterious to me, and I eagerly wished to know. Similarly, I could not imagine any thing that was not divisible, or in any two indivisible points you could not insert something between. That is, I found the idea of continuity irresistible. But I also heard about the idea of discrete quantum, which was said to be the deepest truth of the microscopic world.

There were many other challenges. One was Russell’s set of all sets as its proper subsets, the other was action at a distance. I was defeated by Russell, and found Leibniz’s challenge to Newton’s gravity in terms of comprehensibility, namely  intuitive visualizability, interesting. Should truths about the world be visualizable? If the answer is yes, then Newton’s action at a distance and quantum jumps would be in trouble. But if the deepest truths lie only in mathematical formulae without having to be visualizable in space and time, then what is the nature of space and time?

In my senior year at high school, I applied to Beijing University for studying in mathematics and physics. My idea was to know science first, then move on to metaphysics, then to the human world, and then to knowledge of the good and beautiful.  To be young is to dream ambitiously! My entrance examination scores were very high, but my application was rejected. I was informed that because of my father’s political history, I was in the category of no-admission. I was immediately thrown into a dark tunnel with no light at the end.

My father was a herbal drug store salesman. He was arrested and sentenced to prison for five years in 1954 because he joined a trade union that had some connection with the Nationalists. I tried hard to accept this treatment by rationalizing the Party’s argument in terms of the class struggle during the civil war. But I simply could not rationalize why I should be treated in a similar way. What was the justification for my fate being determined by a father who joined the “wrong” trade union? I was puzzled, and began to study Marxism systematically, trying to understand what I had encountered in my life.

Marxism in China was a set of dogmas. But by reading Marx’s own works, I learned that Marxism could be very critical in the best sense of the term. From 1959 to 1962, I spent three years studying Marxism. In addition to classical work, I also read in translation articles from the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Italy and France. My conclusion was that nothing done in China could be justified by Marxism. During that period, the China-Soviet Union dispute became more and more intensive, and I was completely in sympathy with Khrushchev’s fight against the personality cult and his attempts at reform, and thus took Khrushchev’s side and against Mao.

At the same period, I also studied mathematics and physics. I followed Marx’s suggestion: morning should be for one thing, the afternoon for something else, the evening for still another thing. In my case, roughly, morning was for mathematics, afternoon was for physics, and evening was reserved for Marxism and related German philosophy and political economy.

That was the darkest period for China. Dozens of millions of people were starving to death. We were always in hunger. I had no chance to get to college or find a job. Strangely, it was also a wonderful period for me, since with each day passing away, I felt myself being enriched, knowing more and more what I wished to know.

Then a miracle happened. There was a twist in party’s line in 1962, and I was given a chance to get into the department of philosophy at Beijing University. But three weeks after that, Chairman Mao’s newest policy was announced, and class struggle became the guiding dogma again.

When the party machinery was searching for class struggle everywhere, including university classrooms, I tried to argue against it since I felt it was ridiculous: in socialist China, all class enemies were eliminated already, we did not have capitalists or landlords, we did not have exploiting classes anymore.  So what was meant by “class struggle”?  I argued with my friends, and argued with teachers.  Looking back with the benefit of hindsight, my courage was ridiculous.  There was no comparison in terms of power and strength.  On the one side was the huge party machinery, on the other side were a few freshmen.  But at that time, I felt I was powerful enough to argue against and defeat the party line, because I felt that I had ideas and I had arguments.  Personality cult was wrong, socialism should be reformed, Marxism is humanism in nature.  And so forth etc.

The result was that we were smashed.  In the summer of 1964, two years before the cultural revolution, I was openly criticized, detained, arrested, sent to labor camps, and to various jails; sometimes I was placed in a solitary cell, other times in a cage that was specially designed for prisoners with mental problems.

That was a very difficult time.  My best friend, a young man from a top family, committed suicide.  But I never entertained that solution.  I was optimist.  I did not think the wrong line would last for long. When the cultural revolution started, I was fascinated and full of hope: it was madness, but at least it was a step to the end.

So I was preparing for the end.  It did not come soon.  A long time passed.  It took ten years for Mao to die; it took another three years for Deng to end Mao’s policies.  During that period, I had difficult times, and dangerous moments.  But I was never desperate.  I had reasoned arguments to convince myself that wrong thing would not last for long.  In solitary confinement, I played chess with myself to kill time, I mused over various things, for example over metaphysical views about infinity and continuity, I reviewed mathematics and physics, I even got to start learning English. I memorized words and grammar, I tried to use words to compose sentences with the help of rules. Without having learnt English this way, I would not have been able to apply to Cambridge University’s doctoral program in the philosophy of science in 1982, or to start a new life which ultimately led me to this podium.

The end came in 1979 when I was allowed out of prison. It was wonderful to go out to the street, to see trees and children.  So I was right in my conviction that wrong thing would not last for long.  But it was still very long, though it could have been yet longer.  On further reflection, I decided that I was simply lucky, that it was just an accident that I made it, and indeed that my optimistic conviction was not well founded.  So I would not like to give you the false impression that with well reasoned ideas and arguments, you will be able to predict the future and act accordingly with an assured success.  No, far from it--although I was convinced to the contrary when I was young!

Some of you may share a view with many people in the street, that philosophy may be wonderful, but is impractical or even irrelevant to real life.  Philosophy may or may not be impractical if you are going to be a nurse or an investment banker; it was not even really practical, in the sense of politically effective, in political and ideological disputes like the one I underwent.  But it is highly relevant to real life, at least to me.  It was philosophy that gave me the courage to face up to and argue against injustice, the endurance for the ordeal, conviction for the future, the pleasure in musing over deep things (such as infinity and continuity or the difference between a veiled reality that is expressible only by mathematics and phenomena that should be visualizable). Philosophy remains a matter of life and death for me even now.

I believe that philosophy will be deeply relevant to your life too if you continue to take it seriously. So let philosophy accompany you as you move on to new things. You will never regret it.
Thank you for your attention.

Back to Top

Commencement Address delivered by Ms. Jennifer Sichel (CAS ’06)
School of Management Auditorium, Boston University, May 14, 2006

Good evening and welcome.

I am very grateful to be here.

I am grateful for this small piece of time that we’ve all set aside, in our very busy lives, to join together in mutual pride and shared joy.  It’s really quite remarkable.

We’ve all worked hard to be here—we, the graduating class—but also you, our parents, relatives and friends, and especially, our teachers.  And here we are… taking time, pausing together to commemorate the end of one phase, the end of one period of time, and to celebrate the beginning of the next.

And that’s what I’d like to speak about tonight, time.

We fracture our lives into units of time.  We count days, we celebrate birthdays and anniversaries. We say that we’ll meet in an hour, that we’re running five minutes late, that time passes too quickly or too slowly…

But, as St. Augustine poignantly asks, “What is this time?”

“If no one asks me, I know,” he says, “If I want to explain it to a questioner, I do not know.”  (It’s funny how that works!)

It seems, though, that on a basic level, we can divide time into three distinct units: past, present and future.  Yet the past is gone and the future hasn’t happened yet, so neither past nor future exist.

All that we have is right now, the present—but what is the present?  The present is a point when future becomes past.  It is a point so short and so fleeting that it is not extended at all.  As St. Augustine so eloquently puts it: “The present, cries aloud that it cannot have length.”

Before we can even call it our own, the future has already become our past.  Time exists only in that it constantly slips away from our grasp.

So, what do we do about this?  How do we do to hold onto time?

We strive.  We “strive for the savor of eternity,” as St. Augustine puts it.  But how do we strive?

We strive by using our minds.  We strive by remembering, attending and expecting.

We have an extraordinary power to turn the past into the present by remembering it.  We can likewise bring the future into the present by expecting it.  And, perhaps most importantly, we can hold onto the present by paying attention.  It is only when we stop paying attention that we forget.  And once we forget, our time disappears.  Time then exists, quite literally, in our thoughts, as an extension of our minds.

And we hold onto time by extending our thoughts, by thinking.

By looking closely, by listening carefully, by thinking deeply and critically, we can stamp the contour of a particular moment into our minds.  By concentrating, by being aware, we have the power to seize and to hold onto our impressions.  And once we have done this, we have the power to make them present again as memories.

Last week, as I was struggling to write this speech at Espresso Royale (the coffee shop across the street), Professor Roochnik happened to walk in.  I went up to him, hoping for inspiration, and I got it.  He asked me what, in about 20 years from now, I think I’ll remember from college.  He shared his own experience with me, and then I shared with him the following story:

About two months ago, on one of those really cold days in March, I bought a cup of tea at Espresso Royale.  The tea was too hot to drink, and so when I returned to my table, I set it down.  As I started typing on my laptop, I noticed how the steam was billowing from the cup:  It began by swirling around the rim.  Then it rose, in a perfectly straight line, for about two inches.  And then (and I don’t know why or how) the line of steam curved to form a perfect spiral.  As the spiral effervesced, another one formed.  And these spirals, disappearing one after another, varied in size and thickness as they danced into the air.  And so, for about 15 minutes, I watched the steam—I tapped the cup and I blew at it a few times, and the steam continued its little dance.

Although I am, admittedly, quite easily distracted, this wasn’t just one of those times that I let my mind wander instead of doing my work.  At that particular moment, I decided to pause and watch the steam.  For some reason, it struck me as a really important thing to do.

That steam, I told Professor Roocknik, is one thing I’ll remember from college.  And I’ll remember it because I paused to pay attention to it.  I watched it, I thought about it, I wondered and marveled.  I enjoyed it… and now it’s stamped into my mind, it’s a memory.  And I’m lucky, I can bring that steam into the present, anytime I want to, by remembering it.

What else will we remember?  What, in 20 years, will be our memories of college?

Well, we will remember what we looked at closely and what we listened to attentively. We will remember the things that we took time to think about and to analyze.  We will remember those moments when, at the time, we decided to pause and pay attention.  So by choosing when to be acutely aware and when to think critically, we can create our memories.

And that’s what we’re doing here, at this graduation ceremony.  We are making a memory.  We are pausing, all together, in an act of attention.  We are taking time to let ourselves be proud about what we’ve accomplished and to be excited about what we’re about to do.  We are stopping, right now, at the end of one phase and the beginning of the next, to reflect.  By thinking, looking, and listening, by taking time, by paying attention, we are impressing this moment into our minds.  We are striving to make it last forever.

So, to return to where I began, I am very grateful to be here.

I am grateful for this small pocket of time that we’ve all set aside, in our very busy lives, to pay attention, to join together in mutual pride and shared joy.  It really is quite remarkable.

Before I conclude, I would like share with you the experience of entering the Philosophy Department, on the fifth floor of the School of Theology, because it speaks to the type of community that our professors have fostered for us.  Whenever I step out of the elevator and look down the hallway, I always, without fail, see a long line of open doors.  Our professors are available and they literally keep their office doors open for us.  And it’s wonderful—we’re always invited inside to chat, to argue, and to think.

So many thanks to the Philosophy Department and congratulations class of 2006!

Back to Top

Commencement Address delivered by Mr. Steven Karbank
School of Management Auditorium, Boston University, May 22, 2005

Good afternoon. I have a bit of a disclaimer that I neglected to mention to Professor Brinkmann. Though I graduated from Boston University 26 years ago with a Philosophy degree, I actually still have an incomplete in one of my courses, though not a Philosophy course. It was called “Death: Event, Ritual and Decision.” It sounded interesting in the course catalogue, but in reality it was, pardon the pun, deadly boring. In the end, somehow I could never bring myself to complete Death!

Someone mentioned to me recently that it would be possible to have a University without the other colleges or schools that are part of BU, but it would not be possible to have the University without the College of Arts and Sciences. CAS is the essence and center of the University. But the essence and center of CAS is the Philosophy Department. It is, and should be, the crown jewel of CAS and the University. It’s appropriate that the Philosophy Department is geographically at the physical center of the University, the Hub, as they say in Boston. Indeed the Department overlooks the University from the rarefied 5th floor of the building.

When you are asked “What was your major in college”, and you reply “I studied Philosophy”, more often than not, your answer will put an end to further questions. There’s a curious intimidation factor to a Philosophy degree, even if it isn’t warranted. In the very rare instances when you are asked a follow up question, it will usually be “Does it help you in your work?”  Now, as an industrial real estate developer, I never know quite how to answer that question, because it’s often socially awkward to answer it without sounding like an egghead or too condescending. What the questioner really means is “What use is philosophy in the everyday, work-a-day world?” The question is usually asked out of genuine curiosity.

In my case, what better preparation can there be for a real estate developer than studying philosophy? Isn’t it important to know how to analyze complex issues, follow through on problems in a logical order, be persuasive in conveying ideas, know how to write well and know how deal with moral conflicts?  Of course, these skills apply to any work. Indeed, they are life skills.

If when asked what you studied in college, try saying that you studied Thinking instead of Philosophy. Thinking is, after all, kind of a one word summary of Philosophy.  When you hear the follow-up question “Does it help you in your work?”, then you can reply, “Well, as a …”, fill in the blank…doctor, engineer, teacher, businessperson, lawyer… “thinking does come in handy sometimes in my work …”.

To those of you who don’t go on to teach Philosophy, regrettably, you may forget much of the specific information that you’ve learned over the past four years. I’m sure your professors won’t want to hear that, but nevertheless, it’s the case. What you won’t forget that you learned from them is how to think more clearly, how to ask questions, how to separate the logical from the illogical, and perhaps even how to separate what is true from what is specious.

I received a wonderful education at Boston University and in the Philosophy Department. As I look back on my years here, perhaps what is most memorable is not any specific class material, but the messages exemplified in the character of my professors: that life is to be lived with energy, engagement, curiosity, commitment and a sense of humor.

Some years ago, after learning one of life’s hard lessons, I asked a wise old friend, who coincidentally graduated from BU Law school in the 1950’s, why I hadn’t understood that particular lesson years before and saved myself and others so much grief. His response was “because you weren’t ready!” Well, there are a few things that I wish I had learned earlier, when I was still green out of college, had only I been ready:

• Persevere: Don’t take ‘no’ for an answer. Never give up.
• Be passionate about your work. If you can’t be, you’re probably not in the right job, or at least, you’re not yet ready for it.
• Be courteous to people. As an old client of my father used to say, in his thick Yiddish accent: “Courtesy doesn’t cost a penny...you can afford to give it away.
• Your integrity is sacrosanct. It’s much easier to keep it than to get it back.
• Keep writing, rewriting and editing. Writing well, and clearly, is very highly valued and appreciated, but oddly underemphasized in the everyday world.
• Remember to thank people who have made an impact on your life, be they your professors, your parents, your siblings, your colleagues or your friends. They and you will fell better for it.
• Keep in touch with people you come to know, be they fellow students and professors, colleagues at work or acquaintances you make anywhere else. Your friendships will provide you with a reservoir of serendipity.
• Lastly, stay in touch with the Boston University Philosophy Department. It has been your intellectual and, perhaps, your spiritual home for most or all of the last four years, and you will find, will remain so for many years to come.

Congratulations to you, your family and your professors!  I wish you the best of luck in your future endeavors.

Back to Top

Commencement Address delivered by Mr. Jared Miller (CAS ’05)
School of Management Auditorium, Boston University, May 22, 2005

For the past four years I have pursued studies in History and Philosophy. Both disciplines were born together. The same city in which Thucydides, the great historian of the Peloponnesian War, was born was also the home of a man named Socrates. It was in the city-states of ancient Greece, in particular in democratic Athens, that there arose for the first time a curiosity about others; an openness to considering different cultures and past societies that resists the prejudice that our view of the world is the only meaningful one while all the others are necessarily bizarre, inferior, perverse, or evil. As Hannah Arendt once said, “Impartiality enters the world with Homer.” Philosophical questions about the meaning of Goodness, Truth, Justice, and Beauty first appeared in the same society that took seriously the historical questions “how did we get here?” and “why are we who we are?” This is no coincidence. History and philosophy are different forms of a single interest in the critical examination of one’s own institutions. They both represent an urge to question and confront the truths and values that order our lives. For those communities that lack this openness, there is no history and certainly no philosophy; there is only the undisputed reign of tradition, or simply the ‘recording of events’ by chroniclers of the powerful. History consistently teaches us that things have been, and hence could be, different from what they are now, that humans have lived in other ways, according to other laws and other norms, that the present world is not the only possible world. Likewise, philosophy presupposes that truth is not always what it first appears to be, that all claims about it ought to be open to reflection, and that authority does not automatically equal validity. The study of history and the enterprise of philosophy thus share a distinctly critical interest, an interest that demands a society open to the interrogation of its own principles. For defenders of the status quo, these disciplines have always possessed a deeply subversive potential.

Questions of this sort have a particular relevance today. Today’s graduates were not even ten years old when the Berlin Wall fell and the world changed. And yet, our journey to adulthood took place at a time when our leaders never ceased to comfort us with the promise that despite the evidence of history there was no alternative to the status quo. In the face of persisting miseries, inequalities, and injustices, they continued to assure us that we lived in the ‘best of all possible worlds.’ We stood, we were told, at the end of history. It is not surprising, then, that our reaction to the tragic events of September 11th was largely one of disbelief. Over the past four years, we have witnessed the division of the world anew into allies and enemies all according to the tale of an epic struggle between Good and Evil. So powerful is the story that anyone who questions it is instantly placed on the side of the evildoers. This polarizing view of the world undermines the possibilities for the critical examination of our own society at the very moment when historically and philosophically informed dissent is most desperately needed.

Similar challenges faced the founders of our disciplines. Thucydides wrote his history in the midst of a disastrous war that Athens had, in large part, provoked. His was an attempt to understand where the city had gone astray. Socrates devoted his life to questioning the moral smugness of Athenians who thought they knew what was good and what was evil, but had no way of justifying their convictions. Thucydides was sentenced to exile, Socrates to death.  The fate of each is a testament to the danger history and philosophy pose to the established order. As heirs to their tradition, we can not help but measure our actions by their example. It is only by remaining open to critical reflection that we can challenge fixed truths with the possibilities for change.

Back to Top

Commencement Address delivered by Dr. Peter H. Schwartz
School of Management Auditorium, Boston University, May 16, 2004

First, Congratulations to the 2004 Boston University Philosophy Department Graduates! And second, Congratulations to the parents of the 2004 Boston University Philosophy Department graduates! Question: Who worked harder to get you here?

Today, I am speaking for a very particular group: the faculty of the philosophy department.  You’ve already heard from other representatives, of the college, the university, and the outside world. But I speak for the Philosophy Department, and I feel this is a weighty responsibility. You studied in many different areas, and did many things in college, but philosophy was your academic center and home.

It is also the last time you will sit and have to listen to one of the philosophy professors speak to you in a lecture hall!!

When I think about sending you out into the world, and what I should say to you and your parents, I’m reminded of a story about something that happened to my college roommate Bub-joo. He majored in economics and graduated Cum Laude and was on his way to law school. But the summer after graduation he was helping out in his dad’s dry cleaning shop. One day Bub-joo was giving a customer back his shirts, and the customer said: “Wow, your college ring looks a lot like mine. Did you go to [our school] too?” Bub-joo said, “Yeah.” There was a long pause, and the guy said, “What was your major????” Bub-joo looked at the guy for a second and moaned, “Philosophy.”

For many of the parents sitting here, and for some of the graduates, there has been at least a little fear over the last couple of years that what you have learned is somewhat irrelevant, that you have spent four years immersed in liberal arts education, majoring in philosophy, and that you will find yourself somehow unsuited for the real world.  I’m here to reassure you.

I have an unusual perspective to do this, since I split my time between philosophy and something else. I am a trained physician and a trained philosopher, and I spend my time roughly divided between practicing medicine and teaching philosophy. So I spend a lot of time thinking about how ideas relate to the real world, and specifically how training and understanding in philosophy affects or should affect medicine.

There are the downsides to doing both medicine and philosophy. One problem is that I’m the butt of jokes in the hospital, like: “Well, if a patient says he has chest pain are you going to ask him whether the chest pain REALLY EXISTS?”

They didn’t know the worst of it: I can make a cogent argument that THE PATIENT doesn’t exist.

I actually had an interview for residency where the interviewer told me that he was worried about my background in philosophy: Philosophers, he said, often seem absent-minded, and how could he be sure I wouldn’t forget important facts while taking care of patients? I waited a second and asked him, “What were you saying?” (Actually, I pointed out that I seemed to do just fine in my rotations in medical school.)

Can you think and act? Is a focus on thinking somehow a detriment to action? That’s the question I want to address today. And of course my answer is NO, it is not a detriment. It is a requirement. It is a virtue. We do not need to fear reflective people being inactive or distracted.  We need to fear action that lacks reflection and depth. Anyway, that’s my claim.

In your time here you have not just spent your time thinking. You have volunteered to teach students and help the homeless and raise money for research. You have been political activists and politically active. You have performed plays, and dance, and music. You have published newspapers and newsletters and yearbooks.

You’ve also lived other parts of a normal adult life that I can’t talk about here because your parents are here. And because it violates the rule against overnight visitors.

And within academics, you have not restricted yourselves to one thing, such as philosophy. You’ve been required, and you have chosen, to study in every possible area. You have studied biology, and astronomy, and chemistry. You have studied history, and anthropology, and sociology. You have studied statistics, and calculus, and writing. All of you have learned a foreign language (well, to some extent).

You have been INTERDISCIPLINARY here. And thought and reflection are best when they are interdisciplinary: bringing together different fields and questions. You have been interdisciplinary in your studies and you will continue to be so as you leave here and move forward in life. Only a few of you will go to graduate school in philosophy. The rest will go on to jobs, and careers, and lives in a different area, where you will take your background in philosophy and bring it to a different world.

This has been my own experience, of being interdisciplinary, and confronting, to the degree I am able, the intersection of medicine and philosophy. And maybe this is a good place to look for examples of how your background in philosophy will impact your future interdisciplinary lives. There are three areas of philosophy and medicine I’ll talk about here.

First, there are DILEMMAS. The field of medical ethics began in the 1970’s partly in response to questions about what to do in situations where our best intentions drag us in different directions. A young woman in a coma is being kept alive by a ventilator.  There is little to no prospect of her waking up. Our commitment to avoiding putting people through unnecessary suffering makes us want to stop. But our value of preserving human life drives us to keep her on the ventilator.

Later it gets even more complicated: There are many people on ventilators who have no prospect of waking up. We could save many other lives by transplanting these people’s organs to them. Now we can continue some greatly diminished (already ended?) lives or save others. How can we choose?

With the help of philosophers, our medical world has made great progress.  There are clear provisions for avoiding using extreme measures beyond what a person would want. There are accepted procedures for deciding when a person’s brain has died, for deciding when their organs can appropriately be used to save the lives of others.

There are still important dilemmas. Anybody familiar with the tragic case of Terri Schiavo knows how complicated it can get, and how contentious these questions can become. This woman has been unconscious for many years, but she never said how long she would want to be kept alive in this state. Her husband, as her next of kin, would usually be the one to make the crucial decision, but others have raised questions about his ability to do so. Religious groups have emphasized that any life like this should be saved, no matter how diminished.

The thorny philosophical questions involved include questions about the relation between the value of life and its quality, how to balance a husband’s wish and a parent’s, whether it serves justice to spend more money in the health care system on such a case.

Philosophers have done well at identifying the major issues involved here, but they can’t determine what will finally happen. They can’t convince the different sides that one particular outcome is the right one. In the end, what happens is determined by political and legal procedures. So the philosophy is there and it is relevant, but it doesn’t eliminate the questions. This is often the case with Dilemmas.

A second area where philosophy is necessary to think about medicine is when we consider the impact of new technologies on our lives. Largely in response to this challenge, there is a President’s Council on Bioethics that, and before that there was a similar body that reported to President Clinton. All such commissions include philosophers, and President Bush’s is chaired by one.

Bush’s commission has focused lately on cloning, stem cell research, and recently the distinction between using medications to enhance life rather than just to treat disease. They have asked what these advances will mean for the organization of healthcare, the structure of society, and even the meaning of human life. Some of this requires considering empirical claims, about what the new technologies will bring. But evaluating such possible changes ethically – what will be better or worse for society and for people – is part of a tradition of questions philosophers have been asking for thousands of years.

And not all these social changes are in the future. We are already much more likely to question the reality and import of human free will, now that we have medications that can change moods.  Our growing understanding of genetics has uncovered disturbing facts about how heredity may determine many aspects of who we are. Evaluating the use of these technologies and the meaning of this science requires philosophy as well. In your education in philosophy, you’ve thought about the concept of free will and are equipped to engage such questions wisely.

Of course, what will happen with these technologies is not dependent on philosophy and instead relies largely on facts of economics and politics. What we decide is morally right will not be implemented unless it also is supported by powerful economic and political considerations.  So again, philosophy frames and situates the debate, without settling it.

A third main area of philosophy and medicine I’ll touch on is trying to make our physicians more ethical. We teach medical students to think about ethics partly to make them better at the bedside. We hope that if they think about the big questions of right and wrong more deeply, maybe they will do right more often. They will be more committed and sensitive to their patients; they will be more like the sort of physicians we want for ourselves.

But of course thinking about philosophy isn’t everything here either. Learning the ethical theories of Aristotle, Hume, Mill, and Kant and understanding them doesn’t necessarily make a student more ethical. In fact, the data we have suggests that changing the work environment and providing inspiring mentors does more than reading philosophy.

And here as in so many other areas, Aristotle got it right more than two millennia ago:  studying philosophy is no replacement for acquiring character. Character must be acquired through training that must include much more than book learning. Again, philosophy plays a role, but cannot be everything.

There’s an inherent tension in the way we discuss a liberal arts education. You come to a great college like BU largely for the quality of the teachers and the academics.

But of course you do much more here than study, and we wanted you to do much more than study. We wanted you to develop friendships and outside interests in everything from arts to athletics. This is partly since we wanted you to develop your character through experiences that are far from books. Your characters are still being formed.

And the three areas of contact between philosophy and medicine showed, I hope, that what you think, what ethical or philosophical understanding you develop, guarantees nothing about what will happen. In solving dilemmas, or harnessing advances in technology, or responding to everyday ethical challenges, much more will come into play than thought. I am absolutely convinced of the unavoidability of philosophy in these areas, but also the limits in its power to determine action.

The only conceit that we cling to, as your teachers, now saying fare thee well and Godspeed (but keep in touch!), is that thinking and action are not radically separate. There is no way to distinguish what you think and what you do. You have been changed here by what you have learned, both in philosophy and your many other areas of study, and you will take it with you as you go on.

Please remain interdisciplinary. Keep learning and thinking about abstract issues as you become embroiled in the minutiae of everyday life.

This is your obligation as citizens too. We are faced with the greatest sort of political questions, now that we are a country at war. For the first time in your lives, in MY LIFE, young and middle aged American men and women are dying abroad in large numbers. You have to think about it and decide what to do, politically.  Will you vote for Bush or Kerry or someone else? I can’t tell you what to do, but I can tell you that you must reflect and then act on your convictions.

This applies to the other great questions of our day. I can’t tell you what to think about this. But I can tell you that you MUST THINK.

When I was graduating from college, I remember feeling like at times they were treating us like young superheroes, being sent out into the world. It was if they were telling us: “You’ve acquired great powers, now use them for the good!”

One of the last speakers [Peter Gomes] got up and pooh-poohed the exhortation we’d been receiving to go out and save the world. He said, “This College has been here a long time and graduated many young men and women, and the world is still a pretty bad place.” His one piece of advice for us was that sometimes when people seem to be telling you, “Don’t just stand there, do something!” that instead you should obey the command, “Don’t just do something, stand there!”

You have acquired the skills here to reflect and consider before you act.  Do not forget them.  These philosophical skills are anything but irrelevant.  They are integral to leading a good life.

Back to Top

Commencement Address delivered by Mr. Brad Berman (CAS ’04)
School of Management Auditorium, Boston University, May 16, 2004

Ladies and gentlemen, members of the faculty, family, friends, and guests:
In the weeks prior to graduation, it’s been a tradition of the philosophy department to select one exceptionally gifted and accomplished student to offer the commencement speech. Having successfully rigged the votes, it is with great pleasure that I take that student’s place. Clearly, the faculty has made a terrible mistake. Word on the street is that even the art history professors were holding out for double what I got away with, but so it goes.

I thought I might begin in the way customary to those of us of meager literary ability: that is, with a quote. This is the first trick people in my position use to convince others that we’re erudite and have some authority on a given topic. The second is to use words like “erudite” when far less pretentious ones would do just as well. And the third, of course, is to distract our audience from the faults of what we have to say with painfully self-critical humor. I will unashamedly resort to all three.

In the Apology, Plato famously depicts the trial of Socrates, who has been charged with impiety and corrupting the youth of Athens. The context is worth noting because, above all, it suggests that I actually did the reading, which may help to quell any lasting resentment over the ballot tampering. Against these charges, and in defense of philosophy, Socrates asserts, “The unexamined life is not worth living.”

I thought today would be an appropriate occasion to offer my own, brief defense of his claim. I have always been intellectually curious—questioning practically everything I could think of. As a kid, little was spared; religious dogmas, social customs, institutional authorities and others were all ruthlessly attacked, and usually with great arrogance and self-importance.  Understandably, my parents found this trait to be really annoying.

Though, when I was first introduced to philosophy through the works of Plato, I felt immediately at home. Socrates was a man after my own nature. He once likened himself to a gadfly, stinging Athens out of its mental laziness. That is to say, Socrates, too, was a pain in the [mumbled grunts]. In any case, the questions Plato raised seemed more essential than those I had encountered elsewhere. To my delight, I found that even questions like “What is philosophy?” and “Should we care about it?” were permissible. So, I decided to major in the subject, and fortunately my parents supported me. I sincerely thank them for this because I know that, deep down, they feared an absurd amount of money had just been wasted on my becoming only more of a smart-aleck.

Yet, answers to my questions weren’t forthcoming. As my studies progressed, I found myself nearer to “Truth” only insofar as I had tentatively ruled out a few possibilities. I sunk, as it were, steadily into the dark marshes of skepticism, suffocating in the growing realization that little, if anything, was certain. To be perfectly frank, it is both an affliction and a blessing from which I haven’t entirely recovered.

In spite of this skepticism and, in part, because of it, I’ve received an absolutely fantastic education at Boston University. I am, and will long remain, profoundly indebted to both the philosophy faculty and my fellow students. With their help, I’ve had more than my fair share of inspired ideas. Freshman year, while grappling with quantum mechanics, I devised a thought experiment proving that information could, in fact, be transferred faster than the speed of light.  This was a huge event, flying directly in the face of special relativity theory. I quickly emailed my plan to a renowned physicist on campus and then set to fantasizing about the fame destined to follow. Einstein? Bah! I was gonna become the Tom Cruise of academia: rich with success and dipping my pen in whatever ink I pleased.

My professor, however, thought otherwise. He sought me out after class a few days later and politely let me know that my argument was a complete and utter failure. Just awful really. And even worse, for reasons I didn’t altogether understand. So, much to my disappointment, no fame was to follow. I remained a poor, college student with neither a Nicole nor a Penelope to attend to my ivory tower.

Sophomore year, pretensions unperturbed, I was again visited by the stroke of genius. While casually reading through a book on the pre-Socratics, I developed a radical rethinking of Anaximander’s fragments. At about the same time, no less, I also began to draft up the underpinnings of an important contribution to modal logic. Anticipating European conference tours and a devoted band of lecture groupies, my ego swelled to unprecedented proportions. As it turned out though, I had spent my time dreaming of fame and fortune more than actually working for them; and so again, each of my “accomplishments” met a ruinous fate.

Junior year, I fell into a bit of an intellectual rut. I thought a change of place might bode well and decided to spend a semester abroad in New Zealand. With the help of six months of liberal drinking and a few indigenous plants, I reached whole new planes of wisdom. It was truly astonishing. The University of Auckland is a place where the best-funded student group is the drinking club and where chugging competitions are regularly held in the quad—at 10am on Wednesdays. Professors would cancel lectures when they were too hung-over to teach, and students would do their bests to help make that happen. Surprisingly, I managed to learn an incredible amount about other cultures, my own culture, and myself in this environment. But, needless to say, I had few delusions of having made any significant philosophical breakthroughs at the time.

Come this past year, and with these repeated academic failures in mind, I decided to take a course better suited to my track record. Enter Professor Griswold’s seminar on reconciliation with imperfection. Here was my chance to philosophically analyze my condition and perhaps even come to terms with it. Well, never have I so acutely understood what Socrates meant by knowledge of ignorance. I’m now aware of not one, but six distinct types of perfection and four ways in which I have yet to reconcile myself to a lack of it.

As philosophers, we are commonly thought to ask unanswerable questions, wasting our time on futile pursuits. A short study of the history of philosophy might seem to bolster the charge; although often in novel manners, contemporary philosophy is largely addressing the questions of the ancients. In light of their supposed unanswerability, it’s no wonder that perfection so routinely eludes our investigations. Why, then, do we bother? Fast cars, private jets, trophy spouses: sure, the perks are nice, but what’s our real motivation?

We “bother” because the world we live in is not something that we are forced to passively accept. On the contrary: all of our thoughts, our choices, and our actions are pregnant with philosophical consequence. They make sense only in relation to an understanding of what it means to be. And that understanding is conceived, not received.  In everything we do, whether knowingly or unknowingly, but without exception, we actively assert values or make judgments about the way things are and what’s possible. Through this valuing and judging, we establish the world as much as react to it. Thus, in a very real sense, we are forever creating the world and ourselves.

In living life, we define it—we give it a meaning. We are free to reinterpret the past, invent the present, and frame the future. Yet, with this freedom comes an attendant and equal sense of responsibility. We can, it is true, elect the path of naiveté, recklessly and unwittingly determining what it means to be. But life as such, unexamined, couldn’t really be worth living, since its very worth would be concealed and deformed. We can, however, instead elect the path of philosophical responsibility, rigorously examining our lives and consciously shaping our horizons.

My wish for all of you is to have the continued courage to make the latter choice, trusting that your diligence will pay off.  After four years of my own hard work, I am proud to relate that, come August, I have a seven-figure salary to look forward to, and not just in my dreams—that’s right, seven. It’s payable in Japanese yen, but I’m optimistic.

Class of 2004: thank you and congratulations!

Back to Top

Commencement Address delivered by Dr. Leroy Rouner
School of Management Auditorium, Boston University, May 18, 2003

PHILOSOPHY AND CITIZENSHIP

This is a wonderful moment, because this is the last speech of the day... almost. But, as Henry the 8th said to his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, "I won't keep you long."

So you're educated. Good for you.

Do you remember the interchange at the beginning of the Protagoras when the young Hippocrates comes to Socrates and says he wants to study with Protagoras, and Socrates, as usual, replies with a question? He doesn't ask whether this will help get him into Law School, or make a six figure salary. He asks, "What will he make of you?"

So, I ask you: What have we made of you? Who have you become? What do you want now? What do you take with you from this time in your life?

Let me guess. Ambition is certainly one thing. When I graduated from Harvard College in 1953 we were all ambitious – the liberals among us wanted a good looking wife, a summer home in New Hampshire, a Volvo station wagon, 2 and 1/2 kids, and a job with the World Health Organization or L.L. Bean. The conservatives wanted a very good looking wife, a large summer home in Maine as well as a condo in Florida; a Mercedes; 1 and 1/2 kids, and a seat on the New York stock exchange or the Republican National Committee.

We wanted to be a success. I think I really wanted to be President of the World. And what did we think success was going to do for us? I think we thought it was going to make us happy. In either secular or religious tens I think we thought it was going to save our souls. But you know, I gave a talk at our 40th reunion - that's four zero, not one four - and the one thing I said on that occasion that everyone seemed to agree with, was this:

"In our desire for success we are all disappointed, some of us are disappointed because we didn't achieve what we had hoped for 40 years ago. The rest of us are disappointed because we achieve what we had hoped for, only to discover that it didn't do for us what we thought it was going to do." In itself, it didn't make us happy; in itself, it didn't save our souls. So if what you take from this place is only ambition, you will have missed something more important.

What I hope you take with you is courage. Socratic courage. Not bravado, not simple gutsiness, but what Paul Tillich called "the courage to be," the kind of integrity and inner coherence which Charles Griswold spoke of once in a lecture on the real meaning of happiness. This is the courage of one who knows himself or herself, who trusts that there is a certain rightness of things in the universe, and who is willing to stand and deliver according to her or his beliefs in how that rightness is played out in the critical issues of the day.

I commend this kind of courage to you because, in the tradition of Socrates, one of the things we have tried to make of you is good citizens.

Ours is a time of increasing civic distress. The American inner city has become a war zone. In the summer of 1951 I worked with a street gang in East Harlem in New York. There was one knife fight, and one kid died from a heroin overdose, but it was mostly like Bernstein's West Side Story without the music. Those kids didn't have guns, and they weren't killing each other over a pair of Reeboks, or a gold chain, or because one 13 year old kid gave another a funny look that "dissed" him, so he killed him. The popular explanation for the recent explosion of violence is economic. We are told that the new phenomenon of "unmotivated murder" comes from the despair of the jobless. But Robert Samuelson, in an op-ed piece in the Boston Globe a couple of years ago entitled, "It's not the economy, stupid" charted the economy of America's inner cities and showed that what had been a bad situation in 1951 was now actually a little less bad than it had been then. My kids couldn't afford gold chains and Reeboks. So you can't blame the violence on the economy.

What we suffer from is a cultural crisis. As pluralism becomes more influential, relativism becomes more popular, and subjectivism increasingly becomes the order of the day, because your own inwardness is the only authority left. We hobble through our minefield of moral dilemmas with a few limp and thoughtless generalizations like "It's OK, just so long as it doesn't hurt anyone else," or we make passionate proclamations which have wide popular support, but are often not clearly thought through. Yeats had already characterized ours as a time in which "the best lack all conviction, and the worst are full of passionate intensity." Subjectivism leads inevitably to an emphasis on individual rights, and that takes us back to Hobbes' Leviathan and the clash between meum and tuum what I take to be my rights, and what you take to be yours. It also leads to the 13 year old, looking out for No.1, who shoots the kid who "dissed" him.

So we face a confusion of values, a loss of civility, an inability even to have a rational public discourse about what our problems are. We don't have a national dialogue on the abortion issue, for example, we only have people screaming at each other about the right to life on the one hand, and the right of a woman to control her own body on the other, and occasionally killing those who disagree. Neither side has articulated a clear idea of what their "right" might mean. Both assume their right to be absolute, but it is not clear to many whether anyone has an absolute right to anything. There is no public philosophy in America anymore because we are unable to have a rational, coherent argument with one another about the great issues of the day. We don't dialogue, we have protest movements. And without a recovery of that discourse, the fabric of American society is going to unravel, because we are no longer held together by those common values, and that common sense of pride in being an American which was the great gift of America's earlier years.

It was that "common cake of custom" as the anthropologists call it, that made the American experiment in a pluralistic democracy possible. We could have a unified nation, in spite of racial, ethnic and religious differences because to some degree or other America was our common vision and our common hope. Perry Miller has argued that the history of American literature is a long running explanation of the question: "What does it mean to be an American?" We've never been quite sure, except that it had to do with freedom, and some vague sense that we had been blessed by some transcendent power. But we knew it was important. And it was a vague yet visceral commitment to this vision of ourselves, this American dream, which held us together. But the message from the increasing violence in our cities is that that common cake of custom is rapidly crumbling.

So what to do?

Just spending more money isn't going to work. Just proclaiming some social dog-ma like "family values" isn't going to work either, because it is only a complaint against "those other people" and has no power to effect change.

The only way to reconstruct a common ground is to engage in common conversation. What we need are people who are willing, able, and well trained in the conversational art of defending a rational point of view with a good argument- America needs a public philosophy. America needs public philosophers. America needs you.

Remember what we asked you to do. I'm talking course requirements for philosophy majors.

You had to do a 100 level Introduction so you had some idea what philosophy was all about. Then you had to do ancient and modern western philosophy so you knew the tradition you were a part of. And then you had to do two other courses. One was ethics, the other was logic.

The point of the ethics course was to show you how great figures in Western philosophy had shaped a point of view about morality and the good life, as a way of helping you do the same. The point of the logic course was to teach you how to argue well in defending your point of view. The catalog copy for PH 107 reads: "A systematic study of the principles of both deductive and informal reasoning, with an emphasis on reasoning and argumentation in ordinary discourse." One of the basic things you learned was to distinguish between a good argument and a statement of opinion. You learned how to make a case for something, which is, incidentally, why philosophy is such good preparation for Law school, because that's all those guys do. And we taught you this so that when some idiot stands up in a PTA meeting and wants to ban all the books in the curriculum which don't reflect his point of view, you can counter - not by calling him an idiot - but by a rational argument, civilly presented, persuading your peers that this is not a good idea.

You don't have to run for public office; just go to candidate's nights, and express your views. And when you are upset about what's happening in the world, write a letter to the editors of your local newspaper, and so forth. Help us restore rationality and civility. Help us create a public philosophy. You are peculiarly well equipped for the great task of contemporary American citizenship, the task of conversation.

But it is a violent time, and people who want to make a difference in their world by speaking up and entering into conversation on the great issues of the day are often subject to violence. Plato's Myth of the Cave warns that enlightened people attract antagonism. Which is why I said to take courage with you; the courage of a principled stand in the midst of an evil day; the "courage to be" the kind of person you are meant to be. Courage, in itself, won't quite save your soul, or make you entirely happy, but it will do a lot more for you than success. It will bring you very close to your real heart's desire, which is to have lived a life worthy of your calling as a rational and caring human being.

Remember Socrates and his passion for the renewal of the life of the Polis in Athens. He was at least right in insisting that you can't re-create a "common cake of custom" until you know what you are talking about.

You now know what you are talking about. So go talk.

Back to Top

Commencement Address delivered by Ms. Dasha Polzik (CAS ’03)
School of Management Auditorium, Boston University, May 18, 2003

Henri Matisse, besides being a brilliant painter, was also an aspiring poet; he wrote, “You study, you learn, but you guard the original naiveté. It has to be within you, as desire for drink is within the drunkard or love is within the lover.” I have studied philosophy for five years now and apparently have guarded my original naiveté well, for I am still inclined to ask, “What is philosophy?” Perhaps more interesting than the fact that I am tempted to ask this question is that everyone is tempted to ask it: “grown-up” philosophers have attempted to pose and answer it. We the graduates have learned to think through and question everything; it makes sense that we should question our task.

The naiveté of the question “What is philosophy?” lies in the assumption that it has a straightforward answer. Like most philosophical questions, it does not, and perhaps we the graduates ought to know better than to ask. But we still try. Is philosophy simply inquiry into the principles underlying various aspects of the world? Then what separates it from the sciences?  Is it the study of the human condition? Then what’s the difference between a philosopher and a good novelist? Does calling someone a philosopher amount to anything more than an honorific? What do we mean when we call a thought “philosophical,” or a person a philosopher?  Does the term “philosophical” just mean that something is deep and abstract?

In a way, these questions are not the most interesting that philosophy has to offer, but I think it’s fascinating that we constantly ask them, constantly turn philosophy on itself and make it question itself. After all, perhaps we ought to be troubled by the fact that we cannot seem to give a definition of what we’ve been engaged in. Is philosophy really love of wisdom, as its Greek etymology tells us? We have all found ourselves under pressure to explain to our troubled parents or our curious friends or our future employers what it is that we’ve been doing. I don’t think any of us would respond, “I love wisdom, that sums up what I do.” None of us claims to be wise, of course, for we know that loving wisdom, for instance, and having it are not the same, but perhaps opposites.

Would knowing how to define philosophy add anything by way of value to our mode of life, to our philosophical worldview? Perhaps we should take our cue from the study of philosophy, from the methods of thought we have learned. What is it that has kept us enthralled through the years of study, has made us debate in class and afterwards, during seminar breaks and late into nights, despite the fact that we cannot define it? What has driven us to torture our parents, roommates, boyfriends, girlfriends, and random people at the coffeeshop with explanations of Aristotle’s conception of the world, or Kant’s argument for rational freedom, or Frege’s definition of number?

I have no thorough, rigorous definition of philosophy, no words of wisdom, no catchy phrase to sum it all up. If forced to defend a position, I would cite Wittgenstein and his insistence that we needn’t try to sum it up, that the very project of defining philosophy is nonsensical, for we have nowhere to stand outside of philosophy to analyze it with “perfect clarity” – but to defend this I’d have to read you my thesis, and then you’d all fall asleep.

But I can venture the guess that the reason we have taken philosophy so seriously, so “personally,” as it were, is that it is personal – it’s a matter of our identities. Floating out in a sea of unknowns, in a world that is hard to love, a daunting life full of difficulties, we have found an answer here, a lifeline in our studies, a definition of ourselves.

For some of us, these years will serve as a foundation, a mode of looking at the world and living in it, a mode of thinking which can be applied to any endeavor. For a few, philosophy will become a profession, a full-time occupation. But for all of us, philosophy has become a part of our identities, of who we are. The analytical way of thinking we have been taught, the value we place on making proper distinctions, on battling nonsense, on questioning illogical patterns of thought – these have become our defining characteristics.

Wide-eyed and bushy-tailed, we sat through our first philosophy courses – terrified in Professor Allison’s Kant seminar (terrified equally by Professor Allison and by Kant), laughing out loud in Professor Rosen’s lectures on modernity and its vulgarity, stunned by Wittgenstein’s cryptic remarks in Professor Floyd’s class, to name but a few of the amazing thinkers in our books and in our faculty. A realm of new thoughts opened up as a text would reveal an entire new world in a single sentence and we felt as though we suddenly had an arcane picture of the universe.  “All human beings by nature desire to know.” “The world is everything that is the case.” “Human reason has the peculiar fate … that it is burdened with questions which it cannot dismiss … but which it also cannot answer…”.

I listened to my professors in awe during the first years, and went home after lectures to contemplate life on my fire-escape overlooking Bay State Road. By junior year, I had learned from the graduate students to be blasé about secondary literature, learned to talk excitedly and convincingly to anyone who would listen about why Wittgenstein was onto something and Descartes wildly misleading; I had my cocktail party versions of all the major philosophers all worked out. All the while, I was becoming deeper and deeper engulfed in the history of philosophy, and by my fourth year I was so overwhelmed by everything I had read that I was quite convinced I knew nothing at all and had no idea how to characterize what I was engaged in --- how to define philosophy.

My fifth year brought some serious work and understanding of philosophy and redeemed my self-image, redefined me, restored the value of my identity in my own eyes. In essence, I realized that the important question to ask is not how you define philosophy, but rather how philosophy defines you.

The study of philosophy is the best task that I have found, the most interesting exercise of the intellect, and its questions constitute a way of life, a worldview, and thus for each of us, an identity. An ever-evolving identity, since one of the benefits of being an undergraduate is having no allegiance to any particular philosophical position. These have been the carefree years of philosophy: in a way, the best years of thinking, for we have been responsible only for discovering ourselves, without any further obligations.

In a single semester, we could go treacherously from being realists to idealists to pragmatists and back again, with self-definition the only thing at stake and knowledge the only goal. We’ve not been responsible for solving the world’s problems by applying particular philosophical theories to public policy – we were only responsible for getting the readings done.

Despite our teachers’ warnings not to get trapped in the game of “isms,” we would choose our camps – “I should be a Platonist! No, a Kantian! No, definitely a Heideggerian!” We would defend these temporary allegiances as fiercely as a mother defends her young, because we were really defending our temporary, evolving selves. Lines were drawn decisively: I have heard a philosophy student say, in utter seriousness, “How could I date someone who doesn’t believe in Aristotle’s Categories?”

But the particular positions are less important, less defining at this stage for us than is the overall value we place on the whole, on the study of philosophical questions. The temporary allegiances to particular philosophical positions may come and go, or they may become permanent loyalties.  But the more important, permanent identity of the philosophy student stems from the undefeatable, unyielding love of ideas, the stubborn, persistent desire to make sense of it all, to get the distinctions right, to make some progress towards understanding.

At least in the sense of defining its students, philosophy is not simply a set of abstract principles or conceptions, not simply something relegated to the university islands of intellectuals.  Our philosophical education has not only given us identities which we will take out into the world, in the sense that we now place a certain intellectual pricetag on clear, logical arguments and on thoughtful analysis of the principles underlying knowledge, art, the nature of the universe, moral conduct --- our training in philosophy has also provided us with a mode of thinking, an ability to question incisively, persistently, logically, an approach to the world which we can take anywhere we go from here.

We’ve been given the tools of thought --- may we use them well and not leave them scribbled in the margins of our books and shut away on our bookshelves. I hope none of us ever stops learning, ever surrenders the love of ideas with which we have been infused here. We have learned from each other and from our phenomenal faculty, and this will be a missed world --- a culture of people who care to ask, “Wait, what do we really mean by the concept of reconciliation, or the concept of forgiveness?  What’s at stake here?” --- and then spend a semester investigating.  Let’s hope we can recreate bits of this culture elsewhere, as thinkers out in the world.

An important question we have faced in our seminars, as well as from people who have not studied philosophy and question us, is, “Can our knowledge of philosophy ‘help’ out there in the world, beyond the walls of the philosophy seminar, beyond the numerous temporary identities we’ve crafted here by fervently believing in Plato one day and Quine the next? Can our permanent identities – consisting of a commitment to careful evaluation of ideas – do any good in the world?” Well, that’s a bit like asking whether clear, careful thinking can “help” out in the world. Any number of policymakers – from the neo-conservatives currently in American government to the philosopher Amartya Sen and his economic reforms in India to human rights activists and lawyers working to defend and promulgate a particular conception of the human being – these examples demonstrate that philosophy’s influence is prevalent in the world.

The task for us is not to define philosophy or pinpoint its role in the world, but rather to let our study of philosophy and the philosophical methods of thinking define our world and ourselves. We shouldn’t ask that naïve, elementary question, “What is philosophy?”, though it’s fascinating to think through our inability to answer it.  We cannot define philosophy without wandering into nonsense, but we can reflect upon what we have learned here, can assess the tools we have been given by means of which we can meaningfully entertain our curiosity about the world. Our commitment to philosophy is what has defined us and what should continue to be our defining qualities no matter where we go from here.  How we will do this, to borrow Nietzsche’s phrase, is “our question mark.”

Back to Top

Commencement Address delivered by Mr. Greg Charak (CAS ’02)
School of Management Auditorium, Boston University, May 19, 2002

Good Evening!

Four years of Nietzsche, Plato, Kant and Hegel, four years of trenchant investigations into the illusions of the senses, and passionate denunciations of modern decadences, four years of Civilization and its Discontents and the Communist Manifesto--of scathing critiques of the state of politics and the price of pesto, four years of studying and practicing the highest art of philosophy...

Only to end up here--all dressed up in fancy clothes--gathered together for one last time in the plush auditorium of the Boston University School of Management!

History is not without a sense of irony (either that or it was our parent's idea). You’ll never convert us, O Managers! (To be honest, I actually took a minor in the School of Management--and please don’t ever let any young businessperson tell you that what we do is nonsense!)

But no matter--we philosophers certainly know how to enjoy the hospitality of the prosperous--and four years of hard traveling on the path of wisdom has I think earned us a fine celebration, as well as a perfect chance to pause and provide some kind of account for what the heck happened to us here.

I sometimes think about my first philosophy class all those years ago--Introduction to Ethics. It was awesome.  Professor Griswold strolled out in front of our grand, ampitheater-like classroom (in the School of Ed building just next door) and he proceeded to write just two lines on the blackboard--“Everything is relative” and “There are no absolute truths.” Now mind you, this was my first college class, and he was the one in the front of the room with the chalk, so who was I to argue. I was a little down of course about the news but I dutifully proceeded to scribble down in my fresh, untouched notebook, “Everything is Relative…There are NO absolute truths.”

But then the magic happened. Professor Griswold turned to face us and demanded to know “what is wrong with this statement--why doesn’t it work?” What? Huh? I don’t know… I was in shock--but a lady about two rows behind me shot up her hand and declared, “well, isn’t that statement meant as an absolute truth, so doesn’t it contradict itself?” Professor Griswold smiled and I was in awe…that woman is a genius and I am clearly out of my league!

I gleefully mulled over the remainder of that conversation for a number of days afterwards--and a few weeks later I brought chicken soup to my new girlfriend, began to read Plato’s Laches, and realized at once that I had found two great loves.

Maybe your experience was similar--whatever the particulars of the story, all of you sitting here at some point made the bold choice to be a little bit different-- to dedicate yourselves and your time here at Boston University to a philosophical pursuit which promised not popular esteem, market attractiveness, or the guarantee of financial windfall--but rather all the rich possibilities of pure learning and ultimately the chance to wander through history and rifle through the vast coffers of ancient wisdom in an attempt to uncover some deeper understanding of both reality and the human condition. There were those magical moments in lecture or alone at night under a reading lamp when you felt as if you were being let in on the secrets of the universe; you had the feeling of being able to step back and see the big picture--the movements of history, the purity of mathematics, and the amazing string of continuity that runs through literature and art.

And OK, maybe you went through that period where you were a little " too into philosophy." You remember: the ripped t-shirt, the beard, the pocket-sized Zarathustra, the exhaustive sermons you would give to anyone who would listen on true knowledge and action and the vulgar state of modern culture, the hours upon hours we spent chewing the ears off our brave and patient friends and loved ones (thank you all, by the way!).

I know I was one silly, broken little man, somewhat lost in the quagmire of analysis--but who could blame us? There we were 18 and 19 years old, enduring the same bleak Boston winter that nearly wiped out the Pilgrims--and doing it in a less than inspirational epoch. We witnessed first hand the terrifying proliferation of reality television shows, the frightening release of Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman, and our version of "Woodstock" introduced the five dollar bottle of water and ended in general rioting. It is not insignificant to note that the first major political event of our college experience was the Clinton impeachment--talk about the desperate need to find something to believe in--so if we had a weird phase I think we can chalk it up to a kind of philosophical adolescence--for every developmental endeavor has its awkward stages and its rites of passage. It was during that time that we received the word of philosophy, that we became initiates into a belief system that preaches curiosity, investigation, and understanding.

So now we are finished; finished with what I am not sure. There is certainly much work to be done. Given the states of politics, science, and the general condition of our souls, the world needs people like us to help make sense of it all--to patiently translate the absurdity into some kind of human harmony and humility, willful dreamers with big, fresh eyes, heads in the clouds and hands in the soil.

Our parents had their try at perfection, their day to look for something better, and just because they finished their search doesn't mean we have to give up ours. We're glad for them that they arrived at certain realizations about reality, pragmatism, and compromise, but their acceptance of a kind of "common sense" just seems to clip the wings of original wonder. And while we appreciate their admonitions and advice, we would just as soon avoid the Fox News channel and find out for ourselves.

As far as leaving this place goes, yeah it's hard. We were only able to survive here because we found a way to make a home. The ability to build a home is a magnificent thing--not unlike the capacity to dream--and just as there are certain dreams that we wish not to wake up from, there are also homes that we never want to leave. But it's not supposed to be too easy I think.

Nietzsche says that: "This is the manner of noble souls: they do not want to have anything for nothing; least of all, life. Whoever is of the mob wants to live for nothing; we others, however, to whom life gave itself, we always think about what we might best give in return."

Personally, I would like to thank the faculty here at B.U.; I couldn't imagine a finer group of brilliant, diverse, caring people to learn from. It has been an honor for me.

I would also like to thank my parents, David and Roberta--anything I was, am, or ever will be is you and because of you.

I want to thank my sister Joanna--for giving and receiving all the screaming fits when we were kids so that I could have some quiet time for thinking.

And thank you Elizabeth Riley--a golden-armed angel who not only never stopped listening, and will never cease to teach me about both the pain and the wonderment of this life.

Allow me to end by quoting another of my favorite lines from Nietzsche: "And when your heart flows broad and full like a river; a blessing and a danger to all those living near--there is the origin of your virtue."

Good luck everybody, it has been a pleasure. See you in San Diego!

Back to Top