Mars and Myron
Mars’ Hill: I understand you’ve just returned from sabbatical. How much time does a philosopher on sabbatical spend philosophizing?
Myron Penner: Quite a lot actually. I had to be reminded to shower and put on pants. There was a lot of staring out the window, yes.
Photo Credit: Tim Andries
MH: As any good philosopher would. And how long did that go on for?
Penner: So Trinity Western University’s sabbatical policy is full pay for one semester leave or two-thirds pay for two semesters and so given the fact that we have a four month break every summer, a sabbatical can lead to an eight month or even a sixteen month break if you take both semesters. I was hoping to take the full year and apply for some external grants to make up for the pay differential. Unfortunately, I found out that I missed the cut on one major grant from Notre Dame, which meant that I had to change gears and do a one semester leave. But I approached the end of last spring as being the start of the sabbatical which gave me really an eight month window to do some research projects and get up to speed on some areas of interest. It was kind of a mix of spending time most every day on goals I had set for the time off, having space to read a list books, and doing some writing and other things as well.
MH: There are rumors that you took your sabbatical to dedicate more time to studying your favourite basketball team, the Purdue Boilermakers [the team of Penner’s alma mater]. You must be pleased with how well they’re doing.
Penner: Well, yes and no. The Purdue team this year is good, but not great. They lost two seniors last year who are playing for the Boston Celtics this year. They’re depending a little bit more this year on underclassmen. And it’s taken them a while to play the hard-nose defense they’re typically known for. And I think that there is a bit of a dearth of senior leadership so…
MH: So, it’s true. You did take time off to further study Boilermaker’s basketball.
Penner: [laughter] Yes. Absolutely.
But actually, in addition to work I was able to go to a research seminar at Calvin College this last summer. Calvin is well known for running summer seminars on Christian scholarship. They bring in someone of note who is an expert in a particular area of scholarship who may have an interest for Christians who are also in that area. And then you go and spend a week or two or three weeks in a kind of structured seminar or format where the presenter provides content and lots of opportunity for interaction. It’s a way of generating momentum on a particular research project. That was for two weeks in Calvin. Actually my wife and two daughters and I took a week to drive down and then spent two weeks in Calvin and then took a week to drive back. So it was about a month long thing, which was really, really nice. And technically that was during the summer so it wasn’t necessarily during the sabbatical time proper.
MH: Your vacation has an odd work-like sound to it.
Penner: Well, the seminar was very good. The topic was on cognitive science of religion. It’s an area that links cognitive approaches to mental functions. It looks at the mind as an assemblage of different mental tools that are individually geared toward specific processes and then looks at how those then work together. And what you have in the last decade or so are specific applications of that way of looking at the mind to the question of religious belief. So someone might say, “Why is it that humans have evolved in a way that includes belief in gods and supernatural agents and that kind of thing?” And the cognitive scientists in the last little while have been providing models for that to say, “Well, look, based upon how we think the mind works, it seems likely that religious belief is produced by these kinds of modules which have these kinds of purposes for our own mental life.”
Now it’s very interesting and you have some very powerful theoretical machinery there, and people use it for different purposes. Actually, the man who led the seminar, Justin Barrett, is himself a graduate of Calvin… and is widely cited as one of the founders of this discipline, Cognitive Science of Religion. He does lots of primary empirical research and Barrett’s research is cited by guys like Richard Dawkins and others who in their kind of atheistic polemical writings say, “We don’t need god to explain any aspect of religious belief, we have a purely naturalistic explanation. We can see how it is that religious belief is really unfounded.” And the interesting thing is that Barrett, whose research they’re citing, himself doesn’t think that that is an implication of his work. So yeah, it was really good to have an opportunity to rub shoulders with a scholar of that magnitude and get the “straight goods” on what cognitive science is, what it isn’t, how it relates to evolutionary psychology, and how it’s different from that. My own interest in that field is more on some of the philosophical implications of Cognitive Science as a discipline… I actually get to go back next summer for a follow up where we present papers.
MH: For a philosophy professor, there is a shocking lack of tweed and elbow patches in your wardrobe. I assume your wife dresses you.
Penner: Well, she has opinions. She weighs in now and then. She’s often said that it’s her mission as a professor’s spouse to make sure that I’m not too out there as far as how I appear. I think sometime she wishes I was a little more concerned how I look…
MH: I see. Finally, how would you console the parents of a freshman aspiring to a major in philosophy?
Penner: Here’s something I think is true: Every faculty member at Trinity will try and tell you that their discipline helps students in some way and that even if there are no practical jobs in that area, it will help them be a better person or help them in their analytical or critical thinking skills. But it’s only true for philosophy.
Well, okay, maybe that’s overstating it a bit.
When I advise students, especially first year students who aren’t quite sure what they want to study as a major, I tell them, “Go to the course catalog and start reading descriptions of different kinds of courses and circle the ones that sound interesting to you. And then see if there are any kinds of patters in the circled classes.” And if this student finds the kinds of things that we talk about in the philosophy curriculum interesting—trying to unpack models for explaining some very basic things that are a part of our existence, our beliefs about the world and its most basic respects, systems of value judgment, beliefs about moral ethics, beliefs about the good society, beliefs about whether or why we should think there’s a god—any of those things, I encourage that student to take those courses that interest them and then trust that pursuing a program of study like that will lead to a sort of meaningful life for them.
…
Myron’s full apology for pursuing the discipline of philosophy did not fit in this issue but the recording can be heard at marshillonline.com and if you’ve ever considered studying philosophy, it is worth a listen.
Michael Biornstad
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