The below is my contribution to a small scrapbook-like publication called Intersections, in honour of my former Ph.D. supervisor Michael Hauskeller. I was asked by his wife, Teo, to write a short piece reflecting on when and how my thinking intersected with Michael’s, which I was only too happy to do. I thought it’d be a shame not to circulate it more widely, so it’s republished here with Teo’s permission. Enjoy!
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My thinking first intersected with Michael’s back in 2012 when I read his book Biotechnology and the Integrity of Life.
I’d been looking for references in English-language works of philosophy to Hans Jonas, who I was considering making the subject of my PhD thesis. Even though Jonas is only mentioned a couple of times in Michael’s book, Google’s search algorithm deemed it relevant to my needs and duly brought it to my attention. I quickly read the whole book, which led me to the blog that Michael used to write on pretty much anything and everything of philosophical interest. On the basis of both book and blog I applied to do a Ph.D. at Exeter under Michael’s supervision, and so that first intersection led to a second.
That first intersection was therefore the most consequential, which raises the question of what it was that I saw and admired in his work. I think I could pinpoint three features in particular, features that to me define philosophy as it should be done.
The first is Michael’s style of writing, which is clear without being dry, and rooted in a deep learning that is nevertheless worn lightly. This is difficult to achieve but ought, in my opinion, to be a standard aspiration of academic philosophers. Perhaps another way of understanding this stylistic balance is as a combination of the best of both Germanic and Anglophone philosophy. The former has tended to prize depth of learning, and rightly so, but this is difficult to pair with a lightness of expression. Anglophone philosophy, by contrast, has tended to prize clarity – often to a fault, since it frequently veers into aridity. Michael’s writing succumbs to neither’s pitfalls, but instead combines the best of both, and it struck me then – and strikes me now – as a model of good philosophical writing.
The second feature of Michael’s work that defined that first intersection – insofar as it was exactly what I was looking for in a doctoral supervisor – was its openness to ideas that lie slightly outside the boundaries of mainstream Anglophone philosophy. The book in question was titled Biotechnology and the Integrity of Life, and it was the latter half of that title that appealed most. In fact, the topic of biotechnology interested me – and I think Michael too – pretty much because it illuminates the concepts of integrity and dignity as they apply to living beings. This was something of a revelation to me, as I’d been raised in the tradition of philosophical ethics that concerns itself almost exclusively with benefits, harms, and human dignity. I was well aware that ethics was, or could be, so much more than this, but I didn’t then have the vocabulary to express what this ‘more’ really was. I found that vocabulary in large part through Michael’s work – his openness to the idea that plants and non-human animals might have something called integrity, and that this might be worth caring about, indicating to me that he possessed the mindset philosophical ethics requires to be done well.
The third and final feature of Michael’s work that strikes me as exactly right follows from the second, but is broader and harder to explain. If pushed I would describe it as taking the world seriously. His writing – from those books and blog posts, through to The Meaning of Life and Death – is always engaged with the richness of the world, its ambiguity, and its puzzles. This means not looking at the world through the lens of disciplinary debates, but rather the other way around: starting with the world itself and then moving to theory, all the while keeping the world in view. This attentiveness is, to my mind, the eternal wellspring of philosophy, and the test of any good philosophy is how well it can enact it. Certainly this is true of ethics, since what it explores is the moral texture of the world, the way that good and bad, right and wrong manifest in the unfolding of things. Of course, being able to write in the manner that I described above is one of the best ways of doing philosophy in a way that takes the world seriously – and so style and subject matter are intimately connected.
For me this ultimately defines the appeal that Michael’s work has, is what marks him out as a genuine philosopher, and is why I am grateful to have had him as my doctoral supervisor.
Lewis Coyne 