Abstract / Resumo
- Abstract: In this wide-ranging interview with José Maihub, world-renowned philosopher Susan Haack reflects on her long, rich intellectual life.
- Resumo: Nesta ampla entrevista com José Maihub, a renomada filósofa Susan Haack reflete sobre sua longa e rica vida intelectual.
Interview
JM: Professor Haack, I’ve been reading your memoir, “Not One of the Boys: Memoir of an Academic Misfit,” which is very informative and delightfully candid. I was particularly interested to see that you were the first person in your family to go to university, and that you actually made it to Oxford, the most prestigious of the British universities. Can you tell us more about how this came about, and about the problems that you faced in your new life as a student?
SH: Well, the first thing to say is this was a long time ago, and it was in Britain. At that time, only roughly two percent of the age group went to university, and fewer girls than boys. My family wasn’t rich, certainly; we owned our own house, but, looking back, I believe it was heavily mortgaged, and both my parents worked full-time, I assume to pay off this debt. My mother taught what was then called “Domestic Science” in the local school, and my father described himself as “an industrial chemist”; I noticed that while my father went to work wearing a suit, he carried big wellington boots in the boot of his car–so I think he was something like a foreman in the sugar refinery where he worked. My parents liked the idea of my going to university, but I don’t believe they would ever have thought of my going to Oxford; this was, rather, the idea of the man who taught me history in the good, but regular, state-supported high school that I attended. Mr. Poulter had himself been to Oxford, and he took me kindly in hand and said, “You are going to take the Oxford entrance exams.” Applying to Oxford meant taking a long bus ride to Oxford to sit the required special examinations: one in a subject of my choice (history), the other a translation of a page-long passage from the Latin (which was compulsory for all students applying to Oxford in no matter what subject). The history exam went well; the Latin exam, however, did not. I had studied Latin, but my classes were based on Caesar’s Gallic Wars, and the passage I was asked to translate was of an entirely different nature, something to do with citizens rebelling about the price of bread. The title was in English, and I could read one sentence in the middle, “There was a crowd of women in the forum.” However, I was completely unable to translate the rest. So instead, I wrote a page-long piece under that title and with that sentence in the middle, which was in no sense a translation of the passage. Then, feeling rather depressed about this, and bored because there was still an hour to go in the time allowed, I turned over the translation exam paper and found a passage in Italian to translate. I had never studied Italian, but my French was quite good, and I discovered, to my surprise, that I could translate this passage without much difficulty–so I did. I have always wondered whether I was offered a place at Oxford on the strength of my nonexistent Italian!
JM: Did your going to Oxford cause your family financial stress?
SH: Well, as I said, my family wasn’t rich, and I think my father was very worried in case my going to Oxford would cost more than they could afford, for example, for the puchase of books and the academic dress that was required whenever you went to a tutorial or took an exam. However, I’m proud to say, by living very frugally, I managed to keep my expenses to the minimum–the largest being the purchase of a secondhand bicycle on which I rode everywhere. I managed to keep my expenses within the modest stipend that I received from my local county council. Throughout my undergraduate days, starting even before I went to Oxford, I worked at various clerical jobs throughout every vacation–the summer, Christmas, Easter. I never made much money, but I did prevent my having to be dependent on my parents for living expenses, and, moreover, learned a great deal in these various jobs, which were some in private companies, some in a big hospital in the poorer end of London, some in a public library in the same part of London, at a major tea-importing firm, at a large timber-importing company, at the BBC (the national radio and television company), and so on. None of these was well-paid or glamorous, but the BBC job had one interesting compensation: The company cafeteria supplied decent food, cheap, for everyone who worked in the building; so sometimes you would find yourself sitting at the next table to someone you knew as the star of a favorite radio or television programme. I worked a telephone switchboard (the old-fashioned kind), calculated wages, taxes, and national insurance contributions, catalogued books, and filed correspondence. In one of the jobs where I calculated wages, I also had to put the money in packets and walk this money down the street from the company office to the factory–something like a hundred yards–at the same time every Friday. The boss gave me a ruler and said, “Use this if somebody tries to rob you.” I think I should have been paid danger money, but of course I wasn’t. One interesting thing I can tell you about these jobs was that in one instance I was actually too efficient, so efficient I made myself redundant! The job was in a company that supplied motor vehicle insurance to civil servants. My job, when someone called up with a query or a claim, was to listen to the insurance agents who would call out the name of the person whose file they needed, and go fetch the file for them. On Friday afternoon, things became very quiet, so I amused myself by putting large labels on the large bookcases where the files were kept–A, B, C… And then I rearranged the files so that they were all in alphabetical order. The next Monday, I got a phone call early in the morning which said, “Oh, no need for you to come in today, we don’t need you any more!” (I found another job within a day or two.)
JM: What first got you interested in philosophy?
SH: Well, I applied to Oxford to study for a degree in PPE (Philosophy, Politics, and Economics), because it sounded interesting. But I didn’t really know what philosophy was; indeed, when I went to the local library to look for philosophy books, what I found was a section marked “Philosophy, Journalism, etc.” However, as soon as I began my work in Oxford, I realized I found philosophy really interesting, and indeed, closely related to questions I’d been wondering about myself, without knowing that they were philosophical questions. I regret to say, however, that my mother never succeeded in distinguishing philosophy from religion, and there was nothing I could do to disabuse her of this confusion. One of the subjects I had to study in philosophy was logic, and, perhaps because I have pretty good mathematical skills, I enjoyed this right away. Another subject was ethics, which I found extremely difficult, much more difficult than logic, but I could see how it might turn into something really, really worthwhile if I kept applying my mind to it.
JM: What were the biggest problems you faced as a first-generation student at Oxford?
SH: As I said in my memoir, it took me a little while to catch up academically with the other students; I was the only one of the young women in my college reading PPE who had not gone to a fancy girls’ private school, so I hadn’t been prepared for the need to figure out for myself how to figure things out. However, I soon got the hang of this and found it was enormously rewarding and enjoyable. The biggest problem–as opposed to the biggest challenge–was something I hadn’t given any thought at all: At that time, there were seven male students at Oxford for every woman; and this was socially a situation I found extremely awkward and difficult. Matters were not helped by the fact that the university authorities seemed to think of women students largely as a potential distraction; at least, not long before I sat my final exams, I received a letter which explained that, while we had to wear academic dress to sit our exams–that is, a dark suit, a white shirt, a black tie, black stockings, black shoes, and an academic gown–young ladies should not wear miniskirts because they might distract the male students. Well, I had only one dark suit, the skirt came maybe four inches above my knee, and I was a little worried I might get thrown out of the exam for being improperly dressed. Luckily, however, I got away with it (probably by sagging at the knees a little) and passed my exams with flying colors. Afterwards, though, I realized that women students were not really expected to do quite as well as the men. Luckily, however, the Oxford authorities had decided to adopt a policy whereby examinations were graded by a student’s number, not his or her name, and the names added only after the grades had been arrived at, after which the list of students in order of merit was returned to the examiners for their information only; they could not change it. After the exams were over, and I had obtained what they call a “congratulatory first,” i.e., the most distinguished possible first class degree, my college held a party for the new graduates at which they served strawberries and champagne. My philosophy tutor had, perhaps, a little bit too much champagne, and told me what, probably, she should not have told me: “In your case, the examiners returned the list to the registrar, saying, ‘Please check this one–it can’t be a woman.'” Many years later, I got confirmation of this story when I encountered one of the examiners at a conference in France at which we both spoke. Over lunch, he looked at me quizzically and said, “What was your maiden name?” I told him. “Ah,” he said, “yes, yes, I remember your examination papers–oof.” It was long enough after that he was actually embarrassed.
JM: Can you tell me about how you got a real academic job and what that job involved?
SH: After my final exam as an undergraduate, I enrolled for the B.Phil. in Philosophy at Oxford, which was, at the time, the standard degree for people who wanted to teach philosophy in a university. I had some very well-known teachers: Michael Dummett in Logic, Gilbert Ryle on Plato, Philippa Foote in Ethics, David Pears in Metaphysics, after which I wrote a short dissertation on ambiguity and the many philosophical problems I saw as caused by equivocation. Initially there was some skepticism about this topic; one professor asked me, “Is ambiguity really a philosophical question?” However, after they had read my dissertation, it was agreed it was a good philosophical topic and I had done very well. The next step was to find my first teaching job, which turned out to be not very easy; eventually, however, I landed a temporary (three-year) assistant lectureship at a women’s college in Cambridge. Here, I gave many tutorials and, in due course, a small class in logic for undergraduates. After that, though, I needed a permanent teaching position, and eventually landed one at the university of Warwick in the British Midlands, where I taught, not only logic and philosophy of logic, but also, among other things, Epistemology and Metaphysics, which was at the time a required year-long second year course. I had some excellent students, not all academically so brilliant, but every one of them in some way really interesting; one young woman, for example, who was OK but an average philosophy student, turned out to be not only a talented oboe player, but also a talented composer for the oboe. We had in the department only a tiny number of graduate students, but I dealt with several, including one who eventually decided, finding it very difficult to land a proper teaching job himself, to go into educational software, where he had a very successful career (he recently retired). After the B.Phil., when I took a temporary job at Cambridge, I also enrolled for the Ph.D., since my teaching load allowed me time to do my own work on the side. My Ph.D. dissertation, Deviant Logic, was subsequently published by Cambridge University Press (1974), and, a few years after that, when I had been teaching logic at Warwick and was becoming frustrated at my failure to find a good textbook for the class, I wrote a second book myself, Philosophy of Logics (1978). This book proved very successful, selling thousands of copies, and indeed remains available even to this day–though by now the most successful edition is the Portuguese, which sells briskly in Brazil.
JM: Can I ask you to explain what you mean when you speak in the last chapter of Philosophy of Logics of “logical error”?
SH: I mean, in part, that not only students but even sometimes teachers of logic make mistakes; that is undeniable, but also not profoundly interesting. More importantly, I mean that even some of the greatest logical innovators made mistakes in the systems that they presented. Notably, Frege’s Begriffsschrift (1879) offers principles he believed were “self-evident.” It turned out, however, as Bertrand Russell would point out, that these principles were, in fact, inconsistent; “the set of all sets which are not members of themselves is a member of itself if and only if it is not a member of itself” was a theorem in this theory.
JM: I was particularly intrigued by your paper, “The Justification of Deduction,” which I gather received a great deal of interest, both in its day and subsequently.
SH: Well, there’s quite a story about that paper, which I think will interest you. I wrote it after Deviant Logic was published and while I was writing Philosophy of Logics. I was prompted in part by Karl Popper’s insistence that induction could not be justified, because, he said, if you could justify induction by using induction, then you could just as well justify counter-induction by using counter-induction. After thinking about this for a while, I wrote “The Justification of Deduction,” arguing not that deduction couldn’t be justified, but that you could no more justify deduction by a deductive argument than you could justify induction by an inductive argument. If you could, then you could justify the deductive rule of affirming the consequent (I called it modus morons), if you were allowed to use modus morons to do so. I submitted this paper to the Journal of Philosophy, then the most prestigious American philsophy journal. After nine months’ delay, however, I received a rejection letter with what was possibly the least helpful referee’s report I have ever seen: “Clever, but not clever enough.” So I sent the paper to Mind, which accepted it and published it in 1976. In the interim, however, Michael Dummett had published a paper of the same title; and because he had delivered this as a lecture at the British Academy, it was published immediately by them, sooner than my paper appeared in Mind. I then wrote a second paper explaining what was wrong with Dummett’s paper, but naturally that didn’t get very widely read for a while. Eventually, however, my original paper caught people’s eye; it was published in Spanish as well as English, and reprinted in the second, expanded edition of Deviant Logic, which was published by University of Chicago Press in 1996. Chicago sold more copies of this book in six months than Cambridge had sold in the previous six years–Chicago’s price was far more reasonable. After this, “The Justification of Deduction” seems to have acquired the status of a philosophical classic. I have no way to know, however, how many times it has been reprinted, because presumably Oxford University Press, which took over Mind in something like 2008, assumed that it had all the rights to allow others to reprint “Justification of Deduction” without consulting or informing me.
(…)
Poem / Encerramento
JM: Thank you so much, Professor Haack, for giving me so much of your time and such detailed and illuminating answers to my questions. I have a few concluding words for you from the poem of Boris Pasternak, It Is Not Seemly To Be Famous:
It is not seemly to be famous: Celebrity does not exalt; There is no need to hoard your writings And to preserve them in a vault. To give your all–this is creation, And not–to deafen and eclipse. How shameful, when you have no meaning, To be on everybody’s lips! Try not to live as a pretender, But so to manage your affairs That you are loved by wide expanses, And hear the call of future years.
Thank you so much, Professor Haack, not only for the interview, but also for your globally-known, respected, and independent-minded work.
SH: And thank you, too, José. All my best for you and your work. ¹
Footnotes / Credits:
Copyright 2025 Susan Haack.
¹Thanks to Devon Coleman for helpful comments and suggestions on a draft.