Philosophizing From a Haunted House
It was my first time philosophizing in a haunted house.
Faculty retreats — real ones, which are off-campus, not the on-campus retreats that are basically really long meetings — are a wonderful thing. I recently attended a faculty retreat at a beach manor.
The place was beautiful, but also, gothic. Or at least my American conception of gothic.
Weird things happened.
It was always foggy. Like Silent Hill levels of fog.
Furniture fell apart.
People felt like they were getting sick just by being in the house.
There is a naturalistic explanation of these things, of course. But it still felt supernatural.
As I wrote philosophy in what felt like an estate from a horror novel, I wondered: will this setting subtly affect the content of my philosophical work?
The traditional analytic philosopher will find this question a non-starter. Though I am interested in the way the mood you are in — a mood that can be generated or triggered by a location — can affect philosophical writing.
This is why I have been reading this new paper from Cruz (2023). She invites us to think more about mood in her new paper, “In the mood: Why vibes matter in reading and writing philosophy.”
Here is the abstract:
Philosophers often write in a particular mood; their work is playful, strident, strenuous, or nostalgic. On the face of it, these moods contribute little to a philosophical argument and are merely incidental. However, I will argue that the cognitive science of moods and emotions offers us reasons to suspect that mood is relevant for philosophical texts. I use examples from Friedrich Nietzsche and Rudolph Carnap to illustrate the role moods play in their arguments. As readers and writers of philosophical texts, we do well to attend to mood.
I will talk about this paper more in the next post.