Justin Sytsma: Asking the Big Questions
Is it possible to create conditions for the objective study of topics usually regarded as subjective, like perceptions, emotions, and judgments? Is the redness of a tomato perceived by everyone in the same way? Is the red an aspect of the tomato, or does it exist only in the brain of the beholder? These are some of the essential questions posed by the branch of philosophy known as phenomenology. And for Justin Sytsma (A&S ’08G), a doctoral candidate in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science (HPS) at the University of Pittsburgh, these are the sorts of fundamental issues that sparked his initial interest in philosophy more than a decade ago.
"I was especially interested in philosophy of the mind," offers Sytsma, "and at the time I entered college in the mid-’90s, the focus was on examining philosophy of the mind through neuroscience and artificial intelligence."
Sytsma pursued a bachelor’s degree in neuroscience and earned nearly enough credits in computer science for a second undergraduate degree. But after his graduation from the University of Minnesota in 1999, he felt a bit burned out and not a whole lot closer to fully exploring those intriguing questions that had been the compelling impetus directing his educational pursuits. So for four years, he spent his days doing web design and programming, and his nights in coffee shops, reading his favorite philosophers. Ultimately, he decided to return to Minnesota to complete the remaining requirements for his second bachelor’s degree in computer science, and pick up an additional major in philosophy.
"Up until that point, it never really occurred to me that I could do philosophy as a career," says Sytsma. When that realization came to him, so did a strong recommendation from one of his professors, C. Kenneth Waters, the John Dolan Professor of Philosophy at the University of Minnesota and director of the Minnesota Center for Philosophy of Science: apply to the University of Pittsburgh.
Since coming to Pitt in 2003, Sytsma has found colleagues and community among the faculty and graduate students in the world-renowned HPS department. To date, he has published papers with three of the department’s faculty members; one paper, "Two Conceptions of Subjective Experience," won the 2008 William James Prize for the best graduate student paper at the Society for Philosophy and Psychology 34th Annual Conference.
While some may wonder whether the study of philosophy is as relevant today as it was when Plato and Socrates were holding forth, Sytsma says that asking the seemingly unanswerable questions remains every bit as crucial now as it was in 425 BC.
"People don’t always think as critically as they should, and philosophy teaches you how to think skeptically, how to reason things through, how to probe, how to develop critical reading skills. Essentially, how to understand things on your own and not just accept what you’re told. I tend to think that philosophy is at its best when it looks at basic assumptions that don’t have support and then challenges those assumptions and flips them around."
That perspective is central to Sytsma’s teaching style.
"I like to challenge my students and test their views," Sytsma admits with a smile. "Oftentimes they haven’t really thought through why they think or believe something. And sometimes it’s the realization that they don’t know why they think a certain thing that pushes them to the next level."
In terms of the "next level" for Sytsma, he is hoping to find a position in academia that will afford him the opportunity to continue asking essential questions and challenging basic assumptions, much as his ancient predecessors did.
Says Sytsma, "There are the big questions in philosophy that have been around for a while, and that will always be with us. Some philosophers tend to think that being opaque and heady or hard is a good thing. I’m not sure that good thoughts about the world are the more difficult ones. I think that good ideas are accessible to anyone."