{tutor interview}
Tutor Spotlight
An Interview with Ms. Dougherty
interview by Craig Koch '23, photo by Liz Dowdy '23
How did you become interested in philosophy? I grew up during the Cold War, and that certainly had an effect. I withdrew from my church at 14. Not much later, I read a lot of Marx and concluded he didn’t understand human nature. I read a good deal of Solzhenitsyn too. The opposition between liberal democracy and communism, and the claims and the flaws of both, were thought provoking for me, and I had questions about what was true more broadly. I read a lot but unsystematically, many novels and some philosophical works, including bad translations of Platonic dialogues. As a freshman in College I had a professor who assigned me (it was a one on one reading class) large portions of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind. I don’t know what the professor was thinking but I guess I did imagine that a comprehensive account of the truth was possible. I read enough of the Phenomenology to think “Yes, this may be the truth.” But since I couldn’t tell whether or not it was the truth until I read all the thinkers Hegel had read, I had to keep reading and studying. I somehow thought I could ultimately judge for myself.
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As you began to take an interest in philosophy, how was it that you hoped to pursue the subject? What factors were you looking at for continuing your education? I had no plans. I was on a full scholarship so I figured I had four years to learn everything important. I was a philosophy major because I assumed philosophical texts would include the important things, but I approached classes in other disciplines hopefully, too. I didn’t know anything about graduate schools, probably until I was a junior, when I discovered that my professors expected me to go to graduate school. I applied because I wanted to keep studying. I didn’t have a clear idea of how one went about becoming an academic. In your time as an undergraduate, what were some moments that were especially influential on your intellectual development? One semester I took a class on Descartes, Leibniz and Spinoza. I talked to the professor after class one time and started to make comparisons (or draw contrasts) between Descartes and Aristotle. My professor dismissed my suggestions, saying that Descartes
the Gadfly / λόγος / May 13, 2022
hadn’t read Aristotle. The implication was I should absorb what the professor said in his lectures and ask only for clarifications of his views. Dead end. That was a memorable moment because I knew the comparison was worth making despite the rebuff. I took classes on Kant with an extremely careful reader who ran his classes like SJC classes. He taught a class called “Kant’s Copernican Revolution,” which was on Kant’s First Critique. He asked an opening question and we went at it. He said almost nothing. I remember approaching him with some big claim after class and he just said “I’d like to see that.” It was up to me either to ditch the idea (after all, Mr. O didn’t see it and there was probably good reason for that), or to develop and support it and come back with something persuasive. If I became a more cautious reader and thinker it was due to that professor’s example. My department was stronger on Descartes through Heidegger than on the ancients so a few friends and I took theory classes in the political science department. Why was Socrates put to death? What is human wisdom? These were questions I hadn’t heard anyone address before. In general, reading Platonic dialogues with professors who weren’t preoccupied with scholarly questions but with human concerns was very compelling. I still wanted to know the truth and how humans could know it, but I recognized that when those questions arose in the context of human experience they could more easily be grasped and addressed. After your time as an undergraduate, you went on to graduate school at Harvard to study government, and, after graduating with your doctorate from there, you
