Features
Prof Talk with...Marianne Janack
By Robert Marston '17
December 1, 2016
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What books might we be surprised to find on your shelves?
A book about chairs and their history; a book about country living that includes (among other odd things) instructions on home butchering, managing livestock reproduction, making your own broom and types of earthworms (which includes a pre-test, with questions like: True or False: Worms have no brain [F: they have a brain, and 5 hearts]; Worms have lips [T: they actually have 3 lips]).
Who are your favorite musical artists?
The Rolling Stones, The Pretenders and Bruce Springsteen were my favorites when I was younger, and I still love them. My graduate school musical favorites were Billy Bragg and R.E.M. But I’ve branched out, too: I like Arcade Fire, The Black Keys, the xx, Lily Allen, Florence and the Machine, Joseph.
What is a very obscure interest of yours?
Cobblestone houses of upstate NY; poutine recipes; oddball museums (like the Phallological Museum in Reykjavik, The Mütter Museum in Philadelphia, and the sanitary plumbing museum, formerly in Worcester, MA).
When and why were you first interested in philosophy?
I ended up in a philosophy course by accident in my first semester of college; I thought it was going to be an English course, since it was titled “Genre of the Self.” “Genre” seemed like a word for an English class to me. But to my surprise, it was a
philosophy class, and I’d never thought that way before. I especially loved reading Descartes’s Meditations. So I took another course, and then another— three semesters of taking philosophy—Descartes in each course. I was hooked.
Has a knowledge of philosophical thought affected concrete change in your life, either in values you hold or choices you’ve made?
I read Sissela Bok’s book Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life when I was in graduate school, and up until that point I’d thought of lying about small things as no big deal. But once I read that book, I realized that casual lies are actually more corrosive in many ways than I thought and that a presumption of sincerity and honesty can only be extended to others if you actually try to be truthful yourself. So that made me change my ways pretty dramatically.
How important is a philosopher’s writing talent to his or her work?
I think that people like Kant— who, as far as I can tell, wrote abominably, even in his native German—can still produce valuable work, but if you don’t already have an established reputation, you’d better make your audience enjoy reading your work.
Which philosopher might be of the most use to a college student? Which work of theirs would you recommend as a starting point?
I guess I’d have to go back to Sissela Bok. Lying is easy to read on your own, and an important argument for us all to hear. She also has a book on secrets, which is good. If you have a taste for philosophy of science, I think Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions is a must-read. And finally: Peter Singer, Animal Rights: a classic. You’ll never look at your food (or humanness) the same way again.
What is something you know now that you wish you had known when you were 20?
That even if you [screw] up, there are always ways to recover and make things workout—and people who are helping you along the way. And that guy you think you love and can’t live without will probably look way worse and be way more boring in 30 years, so you can let him go.