 Okay, hello, I'm J.J. Joaquin and welcome to Philosophy and What Matters where we discuss things that matter from a philosophical point of view. So this is a special episode for us because we're live on Facebook and on YouTube. Our topic for this episode is philosophy as lifelong learning. According to the American philosopher John Dewey, education is not preparation for life, education is life itself. This perhaps echoes Aristotle's idea that a well-educated person is someone who has practical wisdom, someone who from a wealth of life experiences is able to discern the right sort of things from the wrong ones. Now in short, education is lifelong learning. It is a continuous, ongoing process. Now the idea of lifelong learning has now caught on in different educational institutions in the world. In particular, this has been explored in Southeast Asia, US, the UK, and here in the Philippines as well. But what is this idea all about? And how does philosophy figure in this picture? And why does viewing philosophy as lifelong learning matter? Now to discuss these questions with us, we are joined by Professor Mary Ann Chabit, Director of Studies in Philosophy at the University of Oxford's Department for Continuing Education. Hello Professor Talbot, welcome to Philosophy and What Matters. Hi there, hi everyone. Okay, so before we start our main topic, let's first discuss your philosophical background. What led you to study philosophy? Well, it was actually quite interesting because of course like most people in the UK, I hadn't studied philosophy at school and in fact I hated school. I was thrown out of school when I was 15 for truancy and disruption for those who care about that sort of thing. And I spent the next five years travelling around. I never got to the Philippines sadly, but I did get to Southeast Asia which was just beautiful. And then when I got back to England I was 23 and I felt strongly the need for some intellectual stimulation. So I started a course with the Open University and because I had no qualifications whatsoever, I had to do a foundation course and I did the arts one during which was philosophy. And as I started doing it and in those days it was formal logic, I sat up all night. It was the most difficult thing I had ever experienced and I realised in the morning that it was also the most enjoyable night I think I'd ever experienced. And so I started reading more. I went full-time at London University where I achieved a first and came on to Oxford where I've been ever since. So philosophy found me rather than I found philosophy. So I read your biography and one of the pictures there of you is that you are a lost teenager. You're a rebel. Is that the case? Well I don't think I would have been thrown out of school if I wasn't to some extent a rebel. Yes. I mean I hated school. Absolutely hated it. And I did everything I could to avoid it and so I did patronise a lot. Okay so who are your key influences in studying philosophy? I think mostly it's one person. I discovered Donald Davidson quite early in my career. I mean he was the philosopher to study when I was an undergraduate so it's not surprising perhaps. But he has continued to influence me in a way that he perhaps stopped influencing other people. I think he's right about a lot of things that other people don't think he's right about. So what particular philosophy, philosophical idea of Davidson do you hold? Well he argues for what he calls anomalous monism which is the idea that mental states are physical states. But they're not identical as types but only as tokens. And he argues that this solves the problem of mental, physical, psychophysical causation. The reason people don't like that argument is because at least partly of an argument by Jaguon Kim put forward the causal exclusion argument according to which the fact that the mental state is identical to a physical state means that the physical state screens the mental state from being the cause of an action. But I think Kim hasn't understood Davidson's theory of causation and once you do understand Davidson's theory of causation you no longer find the causal exclusion argument compelling. Okay so aside from Davidson, who else influence your thinking in philosophy? Well Davidson is the most important person. I mean apart from that it's the usual suspects. So in Descartes I rate very highly. Plato and Aristotle I rate very highly. But quite honestly in the 35 years that I've been studying philosophy different people have come to the fore. And it's quite often been because I've been lecturing on this person or that person and have had to study their work very carefully for my lectures which has led to a deeper appreciation of that person than I had before. Okay so let's go to our main topic now. So the idea of continuing education or philosophy as life long learning. From the Department of Continuing Education at Oxford. So can you tell us something about the nature of the department? Yes well OUDC as we call it is the largest department in Oxford. We have something like 14,000 students and that's because we have in the department nearly every discipline, not quite every discipline because we have no laboratories. So we can do science only to the extent that we collaborate with the rest of the university. But it means that anyone off the street or indeed in these days of the internet anyone in the world can come and study at Oxford by doing one of our weekend courses or our online courses or if they can get to Oxford and you'd be amazed at the distances people are prepared to come for a weekend course for example. Okay so there's a history in the continuing education program right? So I think I read somewhere that it started in the 19th century? Yes that's right I mean we've actually just had I think it's our 140th anniversary. When we started as Oxford Extension College. So if you've heard of Vera Britton for example who wrote Testament of Youth. She lost her fiance and both her brothers I think in the First World War. She managed to study at Oxford by getting in through the continuing education department or the Oxford Extension department and many other people have studied here. It was particularly useful of course for women in the 19th century because of course women weren't admitted to any of the main universities at that point or if they were admitted it was under very different conditions from men. So what's the main vision and mission of this program? The main mission is increasing participation and the idea is that there are people who've missed out on education for all sorts of reasons for example those of us who are expelled for truancy missed out on a university education the first time round and needed some means of having a second chance. Now I got my second chance through the Open University which of course is another strand of lifelong learning but the continuing education department of Oxford University is like the Open University and that many of the courses are open access and of course having put your toe in the educational water and maybe taking it further with doing something like the certificate of higher education or one of our diplomas you get confident with your ability to engage in higher education and many people have gone on from our short courses to study degrees or further degrees or even doctorates. But how do you how should we understand the idea of lifelong learning? Well I think it does what it says on the tin education ought to be lifelong I mean for example I finished my last degree 30 years ago I've got more degrees than I've got O levels I love to say that but I finished my last one 30 years ago if that had marked the end of my education that would be very sad wouldn't it? I mean I've spent my life learning and philosophy has largely I mean philosophy has been the content of what I've learned during those 40 years or whatever but it's also guided my learning in other directions I think that when you stop learning you stop living from my point of view there's no point in living if you're not learning perhaps that's a bit strong in fact I'm sure that's a bit strong but Yeah so I think that there's an idea here coming from Julie and a philosopher like Aristotle that well education is really lifelong and you attain a kind of practical wisdom through just studying and being educated all the time so what's the role of philosophy here in this kind of program in this continuing education program? Well philosophy is one discipline studied at continuing education not the only discipline of course Plato thought that you shouldn't study philosophy at all until you're 50 because until 50 you're too busy or you should be too busy according to Plato in engaging in life in politics in war I hope we don't think that these days but in Plato's time of course war was something that you had to engage in if you were a youth and you were gaining your experiences but when you got to 50 and the time had come you no longer had the energy to actually engage in life but what you wanted to do at 50 was reflect on your experiences to learn from your experiences to help other people learn from your experiences to bring it all together and if you like make a mental map of the world as you have experienced it because of course the experience that you have had is unique, it's different from anyone else's experience and therefore if you like it's something of a duty on you on all of us to reflect on that experience and to learn from it whatever we can and philosophy is the tool by which to do that Okay so I like the idea that philosophy you can't study philosophy unless you have gained a lot of experience maybe a good philosopher perhaps wait till you're 50 Well the fact is lots of people start studying philosophy as undergraduates so when they're 18 or something like that and of course then the benefit for studying philosophy is that as you acquire experiences as you go through life you can fit them into the mental map that you're creating the fact is actually most 18 year olds think they've experienced enough about the world to be able to start doing what Plato thought you must wait till you're 50 to do we've all had the experience haven't we of thinking that we know much more than our parents for example Yeah okay so you have done a ton of philosophy podcasts for the continuing education program so this includes a philosophy for beginner's course, a critical thinking course, a course in moral philosophy and others but what motivated you to do all of these things? Sorry could you repeat that What motivated you to do all the romp through philosophy series Right well funnily enough it wasn't anything that motivated me in particular except my university was given money by an outfit called JISC now you're going to ask me what JISC means and I don't know I'm afraid but that's alright anyway just advice it to say that they give money for doing things like this so the money they gave was to record and release some podcasts under the title Open Spires because we wanted to see or JISC wanted to see and Oxford was prepared to help with this and how many people across the world would be interested in lectures from Oxford University and of course Oxford wasn't the only university taking part so I was approached by our ITE people who asked me if I wanted to record or to have recorded the lectures that I was going to do that which happened to be an introduction to philosophy so I was asked whether I wanted to make podcasts and I had no idea what podcast was and I thought well it couldn't hurt so I said yes and so whilst I lectured and I just lectured in a way I would always lecture when I give standard lectures I was videoed and afterwards I had to sign a form and they released the video on the University of iTunes iTunes U and the next thing I knew about this was about a year later when somebody told me that my podcasts had had one first it was that they had hit number one global number one on the University of iTunes and I thought ooh well that's nice and I said well how many is that thinking it was 100 a week or something like that and he said well it's something like 18,000 podcasts a day yes exactly and very shortly after that it hit a million views and so on and critical reason from that reason of course I couldn't move without being podcasted by the University they were making podcasts of almost everything I did and one of the lectures the critical reasoning series hit 7 million downloads so did you expect such a reaction? no I mean that's all I can say it was a surprise to me but it's not surprising that a podcast on from Oxford was popular on iTunes U it's not surprising that a lecture on philosophy introducing it to beginners was popular on iTunes U I think and the title of the podcast though I say it myself was inspired it was a romp through the history of philosophy so the word romp I think attracted quite a lot of people possibly they didn't think it was philosophy actually it attracted me as well so I downloaded it well it sounds fun doesn't it so my word I mean the critical reasoning is a romp through the foothills of logic so yeah and your moral philosophy as well it's a romp to moral philosophy for beginners yeah okay so you turned all these things into a book but how does it feel to be an internet superstar well I think I used to be an internet superstar I mean unfortunately the open spars project came to an end and I haven't made many podcasts since then people keep asking me if I'd like to make podcasts and to be honest I've said no I would make them for the department but the department has been a bit in two minds about this although with the pandemic I think I'm at the moment recording a podcast for the department so things might change but who knows okay so you have a philosophy of mind series you have moral philosophy but what's the future of a continuing education program and how would philosophy contribute to this you mean online or do you mean more generally more generally the idea of the continuing education something like what you're doing now well philosophy is important to continuing education not least because the core of philosophy the methodology of philosophy is logic and without logic you can't study anything so you need to be able to recognize an argument or to make an argument in an essay or something like that and the best way you can do that is by learning something about critical reasoning learning about the different types of arguments learning how to evaluate arguments learning how to identify arguments and so on and all of this of course is Chris to the mill of philosophy okay I noticed that in your podcast you have students there as well live students so you're teaching them but what I hear is that they are adults real adults oh yes well that's what continuing education is about I mean the University of Oxford most students at the University of Oxford are normal age undergraduates they're they come up at 17 or 18 and they stay till they're 21 but the department of continuing education used to be required only to deal with students over 23 now that's changed now because the law has changed you're not allowed to discriminate according to age so we have younger students now I would say that the average age of students at the department of continuing education is 50 or 60 I'm guessing that but from my experience that's what I would say but I've taught people as old as 94 I've got a 94 year old at the moment okay so what made them interested in philosophy and well they might not be doing philosophy because I'm also director of the certificates of higher education which is a way of getting into higher education if you've never done it before or it's a way of structuring your learning if you have got a degree and want to continue with learning philosophy is one of the areas of these certificates of higher education but in fact the 94 year old is doing philosophy and I have to admit it was my podcasts that got him into it so there you are okay so what's your advice for those starting their academic careers in philosophy okay are you assuming that they're 18 or are you thinking they could be any age they want to get anything philosophy they want to be a professional academic philosopher so what's your advice oh can I ask answer this in two parts because that's alright one is I advice for people who want to do philosophy at university and the other is people who want to become academic philosophers advice for those who want to do philosophy at university or want to do well in philosophy at university my key trick is do not try and please your professor the students who don't do well for me anyway are those who try and work out what I believe and feed that back to me I find that really irritating because it shows to me that they haven't they're not interested in the issue the only thing they're interested in is what I think of their essay so they're just parroting yeah that should be very much a secondary consideration so what I want is for them to work out what the issue is and why it's important why people have perhaps for centuries argued about this and look at both sides of the argument they're able to put at least two arguments from each of the sides so that's my tip for people who want to do philosophy well at university for those who want to become academic philosophers I'm very tempted to say don't like Wittgenstein apparently is that what he said I don't always agree with Wittgenstein it's a very tough life I've got 24 student tutors under me at OUDC who are all people who have portfolio careers in philosophy in other words they're making up making a living by having work in from here there and everywhere you can only give them sort of two or three lecture series a year which doesn't pay for a mortgage in order to get a job that will pay for a mortgage and a family and so on you need a full-time permanent job and those are very hard to come by in philosophy I mean if you study maths at university you can get jobs in accountancy or all sorts of other things it's true that if you study philosophy at university you can go on to be a lawyer or a computer programmer all sorts of things which will provide you a perfectly good career but a career in philosophy is quite difficult to come by so I'm afraid that is my advice don't go into philosophy become an academic philosopher but if you insist on becoming an academic philosopher then my advice is publish as much as you can forget teaching forget all the other things forget being a good citizen do Christmas parties for your department and that sort of thing the only thing that matters is publication and publish as much as you can and I hate giving that advice the reason I hate giving that advice is it's relatively easy to get things published it's very difficult to publish good things and I think you should be doing only the latter but quite honestly if you want a job in philosophy the former is the way to go well both I mean publish as many good things as you can but you have to pay the mortgage it's not so good do so for you is the career of an academic philosopher worth it is the career of an academic philosopher worth it I wouldn't have it any differently but then I started a long time ago I'm actually retiring next year so I'm right at the end of my career and in some ways I've been lucky in that I got in and I've had a very satisfying and very good career but not everyone is going to be that lucky and it gets harder as I mean really as we widen participation and it means that people from every part of the world have access to higher education philosophy like every other discipline is being democratized which is a really good thing but that of course means that you've got a very much larger pool from which the good philosophers are taken and therefore the pool of good philosophers is also larger and a lot depends on luck and pushing us publishing. Okay so we'll entertain some questions from our live audience so if you have questions just put them on the chat box for those on YouTube there's someone they are waiting for your questions as well including for the Facebook okay so here's a question from this zoom chat what's your best selling program in continuing education in Coxford and what are the trending courses in your program in philosophy no in the whole continuing education program oh I'm not sure I can answer that well yes I can well I have a rather skewed view because of course I'm the director of studies in philosophy but creative writing is a hugely popular course in philosophy but also history, academic history I mean the eight subjects that make up the subjects of the certificate of higher education are probably the most popular that's philosophy, history, art history English political economics and two others I can't remember I think these are liberal arts courses as I said with continuing education we don't have laboratories so we tend not to have such a high interest in science so how about in your philosophy program what are the popular courses there critical reasoning and ethics are too well actually they're all popular critical reasoning ethics mind the most popular is the introduction to philosophy because of course what I said earlier about it's not being a school subject is actually quite important a lot of people don't know what philosophy is and therefore they're interested to try philosophy just to see what it's like and often that's without any intention whatsoever of continuing in philosophy but the lovely thing about philosophy is it tends to ambush you people who like philosophy absolutely love philosophy and they get hooked and the next thing you know they're wanting to do a doctorate and do things like become an academic philosopher do philosophy teachers teach these courses the philosophy program courses oh yes of course I mean we couldn't have tutors at the University of Oxford who didn't have at least two degrees in the subject that they teach okay so there's another question here is there a way to access your books free? a free access I think no well I mean there is a way if you like of accessing them free but and that's by my podcasts I mean the for example the critical reasoning book which has been hugely popular is actually a book written on the basis of the podcasts it didn't happen the other way around so first came the podcast then came the book and I've written the book as a it's an e-book I'm publishing it myself or with somebody called Chris Wood who's written lots of widgets and things which I know nothing about it's published as an e-book so it's actually very cheap I think it's only actually I have no idea how much it is but it's under 10 pounds online that's almost free okay right okay so here's another question is a continuing education program visible here in a third world country like the Philippines yes of course I mean if you access the content website my goodness me you're going to ask what that is now aren't you I think if you put Oxford University into the website and then when you get to the website look for continuing education you'll get all our courses and I mean at the moment of course because of the pandemic you can access just about every course we're doing because all our courses are online at the moment unfortunately most of them are not free of course so that's the downside for anyone in a you called it a third world country I don't think the Philippines is a third world country myself but maybe that's but if money is a problem there are bursaries and things but I have no idea how hard or how easy it is to get them but certainly if you have the money access is easy and especially at the moment because of the pandemic here's another question what is the certificate program in continuing education what is a possible job that you could take after this well the certificate for higher education I've been mentioning several times because I'm the director of it it doesn't prepare you for a job so much as prepare you for university so if you haven't been to university the certificate is a course that you do part time for either two years or four years probably whilst you're working and it prepares you by the time you finish the course you will be well and truly prepared for higher education in fact the qualification you get is equivalent to the first year of university okay here's the other question what is the status of women population and philosophy in your university much better than it used to be when I first arrived there were very few women and in fact one of the tutors at the faculty of philosophy used to refer to all the students as gentlemen and he would write notes to gentlemen and he wouldn't recognise the women in the class at all I had a colleague in fact when I was first taken on at Pembroke College in Oxford who wouldn't talk to me at all wouldn't even meet my gaze and I remember entering a corridor one time and he entered by the door at the other end of the corridor and I thought this is going to be interesting so I maintained eye contact with his face not his eyes all the way up the corridor and he just wouldn't look at me at all so it's changed massively over the 40 years that I've been in Oxford there are many many more women now and women have very serious jobs I mean the Wiccan professor of logic at the moment is a woman who is this? I knew you were going to ask me that and I can't think of her name but if you look up Wiccan professor of logic you will find that it's a woman that's right yes actually you're just making me wonder whether it's not the Wiccan professor of logic but if you check these things out I didn't think you'd ask me one of them the two most important chairs in the university in British philosophy possibly in the world of the two one of them is held by a woman 40 years ago that would never have happened okay so here's another question what are the most unique of Oxford? what does this person mean most unique? unique philosophy perhaps the not standard philosophy courses? oh I see well when you say it's Oxford I can only speak for the department of continuing education online we don't really have any non-standard we want to appeal to as many people as possible so we tend to have the courses that everybody is looking for but in my weekly classes in my day schools and weekend schools and summer schools I can do things like philosophy and film studies philosophy and horror was the subject of a recent weekly class we can have things from Plato to NATO I mean there are some very interesting ones but they tend to be the face-to-face courses not the stuff that we have online so I'm afraid that if you're in the Philippines you're unlikely to get the unique or non-standard philosophy courses on offer I'm afraid that's the least from us at the moment okay so who designs these courses philosophy of horror philosophy of Pieter film the tutors I have a panel of part-time tutors there are 24 of them and every year I write to them and I say which course would you like to do for not this year but next year I might be writing a book on it or they might be have just become interested in it for example I became very interested in the link between philosophy and humor once and I toyed with writing a book and had I been one of my part-time tutors I might have offered me a course on philosophy of humor okay so you have doing subjects you could have philosophy of humor philosophy of love perhaps oh yes I've done a course on philosophy of love goodness that was a long time ago yeah so the tutors and you design these things one year beforehand 18 months beforehand they offer me the course and I say well that sounds interested tell me a bit more and if I like the sound of it they write a full course proposal so that they tell me what the objectives are how they're going to achieve those objectives what books they're going to use what videos they're going to use and I will approve that course proposal if I think it enhances our complete program and how do you offer that to the students so you post an advertisement or and well if you go on to our website you'll see that there is something that will enable you to sign up to our mailing list so if you sign up to the mailing list you get information about all our courses you don't get sort of 20 a week you'll get one link to our website when the program's released so how many students do you have on average per class oh per class it can be as I mean we have limits on the class sizes because I mean if it's online there's a limit to the number of students that a teacher can deal with in an online class the limit there is 32 the face class the limit tends to be 25 but actually most classes will be fewer than that about 20 if it's a weekend school of course it can fill the lecture theatre at 115 and also if it's an online course although 32 is the limit if we get enough students we can run two courses at the same time because you're using the MOOC right M-O-O-C we don't use MOOCs we use we have our own online provision we use Moodle as the virtual learning environment at a time like this the pandemic how useful is online education well I mean I think Oxford is luckily a very rich university we wouldn't have collapsed without it but the online provision has allowed us to not lose the amount of money that we would otherwise have lost we had to cancel the whole of the summer school that's hundreds of students were sent away we had to cancel the whole programme of weekly classes so if it hadn't been for the online courses we would have had no provision at all but we doubled our online provision and we've created WOW which is weekly Oxford Worldwide Oxford Weekly WOW without online we really wouldn't have had anything to offer yeah I think that's a problem all around the world as well well I mean Oxford was lucky because we weren't playing catch up we've had a thriving online programme for about 20 years now so we were very lucky to be able to make use of the existing online provision to produce online courses okay so here's another question how many articles have you done journal articles anything not many not many because I'm afraid my career has tended towards the administration end of philosophy rather than the publishing end but that isn't to say I might not have preferred the publishing end had I obeyed my own advice and got loads of applications which is what I should have done so I've had a satisfying career despite not having published a lot so I've published possibly more books than articles but maybe not okay so what's your most penetrating can you give us the title of the most interesting or most viewed iTunes lecture you have critical reasoning critical reasoning so critical reasoning colon a romp through the foothills of logic it's by far and away the most popular and I suspect that's because in many countries like the US for example critical reasoning is a very important skill because it gets you into the graduate recruitment programme of many universities so I mean reasoning is what human beings do and so lots of people are interested in how to do it better okay so your critical reasoning course is your bestseller your top well critical reasoning is probably my bestselling book if not for bioethics I have a book on bioethics published by Cambridge University Press which is also sells very well okay are there more questions okay so here's another question do you have new works coming forthcoming works I'm currently working on a lecture I don't know if you'd call that a work but I've just finished it this morning I think on iconoclasm so talking about the black lives matter and things like that so that's going to be I'm going to lecture on that on the fifth of October I would like to write another book during retirement but I won't start that until I retire which is one year and two days away so it won't be out for at least three years I wouldn't have thought okay I think oh wait you still have questions happy birthday oh thank you it's your birthday yes on the no not today on the 17th of September three days away okay advance happy birthday okay I think that's enough for now so thanks again professor Talbot for sharing your time with us that's my pleasure thank you for your questions okay so you've been helpful in my Ethics program as well my Ethics good yep and you have promoted it in Twitter and a lot of people are downloading that as well thanks very much good well done for doing it okay so join me again for another episode of philosophy at what matters where we talk about things that matter from a philosophical point of view cheers okay bye okay so I'll just stop recording