An Interview with Philosopher Tom Morris, Part 1
An Interview with Philosopher Tom Morris, Part 1
By David Baggett | Plus, A Book Highlight and Current Book and Resource Deals!
An Interview with Philosopher Tom Morris, Part 1
by David Baggett
Tom Morris served for fifteen years as a professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. He is the author of more than 30 books and a sought-after speaker. He holds two masters degrees as well as a joint Ph.D. in both philosophy and religious studies from Yale University, as well as other, honorary doctorates in recognition of his public work in practical philosophy. Tom is now Chairman of the Morris Institute for Human Values in Wilmington, NC.
David Baggett: I’d love to know about the experience you mentioned in God and the Philosophers, when you were an undergraduate at North Carolina, and you experienced something of an epiphany in front of the math building. It pertained to your sense of calling. Can you describe that influence in more detail, and its impact on you then and since?
Tom Morris: I remember the day vividly. I wish I had written down the date and time. But when it happened, I had no idea how lasting the memory or the effect would be. It was like many of the most important events of my life—I didn’t see it coming. There was no preparation that I was aware of. It just happened like a bolt from the blue. I was struck with a thought that seemed to come to me from beyond, an assurance that there’s a reason I’m here, in this life, on this earth—that I have a mission, a job to do, something important to accomplish. I had no idea what that might be, at the time, but that didn’t matter. It wasn’t like I was having a premonition of my work, or career, just a powerful assurance that there’s an importance in my being alive, a specific value in my adventure. It made me feel good, and strongly confident, and somehow grounded in a sense of meaning and purpose, even though, again, I didn’t know any specifics, at that point.
And what’s odd here is that I believe we’re all alive for a purpose. That was just my moment of assurance that I had nothing to fear or worry about concerning my future. First, there would be one. And second, it would be something that I could feel good about. I would be able to serve people in some way. I did sense that deeply and powerfully, but again, without specifics. The phenomenal, keen psychological feel of the experience was unlike anything I had ever had happen to me. It was almost like a voice speaking to me, yet not with a tone or timber, heard by the ear. It was just a thought, a message with propositional content and emotional resonance that came to me suddenly and seemed to touch my spirit in the deepest way. From that moment on the sidewalk in Chapel Hill, I had a sense of meaning that went beyond anything I could explain.
Baggett: When you were still in college, you began your first book—on Francis Schaeffer and apologetic methodology. This site [moralapologetics.com], as you know, is about moral apologetics, various moral arguments for God’s existence. Do you think some of the distinctive features of morality—its authority, prescriptivity, etc.—are better explained by a religious worldview than by naturalism?
Morris: I really don’t see how naturalism can accommodate any degree of ultimate objectivity about moral principles and demands, or even about such things as rights. And the naturalist, like any of us, typically has strong moral intuitions about such things that impinge on our conduct. We may disagree about the details, but naturalists can be as morally offended, or inspired, as any of us. And they’ll have real trouble making metaphysical sense of the power they feel, the power that truly moves them, and us.
George Mavrodes, I think, once wrote a nice essay about the oddness of morality in a materialistic universe that says it all very well—or at least, it struck me that way as a young philosopher, when I first read him. [ed—“Religion and the Queerness of Morality”]
Theism roots so much so deeply in the metaphysical weave of reality in ways that naturalism just can’t do. You have to give up a lot to be a naturalist, and I don’t think most naturalists, even very intelligent naturalists, fully understand this and all its implications. They still keep a foot in the warm water that their own view can’t provide.
Baggett: When you were a student at Yale, you bucked the system and enrolled in a number of classes in both analytic and Continental philosophy, and earned doctorates in both philosophy and religious studies. What led you to do that, and how did that breadth of study shape your work?
Morris: I was determined to leave no ultimate stone unturned. I didn’t care about the divisions in the department philosophy or in the university, or about the animosities that accompanied these divisions. I was intensely curious and wanted to be able to follow my nose wherever it might lead me. So imagine my surprise when I was once in a Kant seminar on the “other side” of the department with dancers and artists and actors and had to read books with titles like “The Mass Psychology of Fascism” and “Love and Lust” and “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” and “The Female Orgasm,” all assigned texts, presumably to help in my understanding of the categorical imperative and The Critique of Pure Reason. Of course, my worries about the connections were a bit assuaged when, like a ritual, we had to retreat to the professor’s office every day after class for sherry and even more cheese.
I think my work was shaped by an intellectual breadth of early acquaintance with a wide variety of modes of thought that was relatively rare in my time. I came to discover that, most typically then, philosophers knew almost nothing of theology; theologians knew little philosophy; continental thinkers weren’t trained in logical precision, and analytic practitioners seemed to hardly ever sip sherry.
Baggett: At Notre Dame your teaching was legendary. I know several folks who served as a TA for you, and to a person they confirm what a remarkable privilege it was to do so. You brought the marching band into the classroom before a final exam, and all sorts of things to make learning fun and enjoyable and memorable, without sacrificing the rigor. You won the Indiana Professor of the Year award at one point. What are the top two or three pieces of advice you’d give to teachers, guiding principles that you followed yourself?
Morris: You have to love your students first and then love what you’re teaching. Love is the moving force. That leads to connection and enjoyment and success.
I often told my TAs that philosophy is serious but that doesn’t mean it’s somber. We always had fun. I wanted the students to think of philosophy as a fun and fascinating and important way of confronting the world. Ultimately, I wanted to bring them back to the ancient view of philosophy as a way of living. And that includes laughing and loving.
I always tried imaginative gimmicks to make philosophical points vividly and memorably. And I’ve had people come up to me in convention centers all over America and say, after a talk to a financial services company, or an industry association meeting, “Professor Morris, I was in your class in 1983 when the lights all went out suddenly.” I’d reply, “Why did that happen?” And then I’d get an answer like “You were giving us a Near Death Experience and it was really vivid and so funny I remember it all these years later.”
A robot might tell corny electricity jokes in a class session about artificial intelligence, or Dominoes might deliver pizzas to the class early in the morning when they weren’t even open, to illustrate something in a lecture on miracles, or I might provide a little electric guitar performance to illustrate something in the philosophy of science. My general rule was “Four minutes of craziness to gain their attention for the next forty six minutes.” We had a theme song that would play when I entered the auditorium. Snickers bars often flew through the air for good answers, or just to start the class. When people avoided sitting in the front, Burger King might cater cheeseburgers to only the first two rows. A month into the semester, we did Early Course Evaluations asking for suggestions. The next class I’d go over the often-hilarious suggestions that my very clever undergraduates would make, and I’d actually implement some of them. They never know what would happen next.
At the end of each semester, on official final course evaluations, students would always say: “I could NEVER sleep late and miss class, because I knew that if I did, it would probably be the class everybody would talk about for the next ten years.” It turns out, some of those classes they’re talking about thirty years later. That’s why I never had an attendance policy. If I couldn’t make it so good they didn’t ever want to miss it, I was not doing my job as I understood it.
Baggett: Your work in philosophical theology greatly influenced many philosophers, including me. I remember reading your analysis of a modal version of the Euthyphro Dilemma that, at the time, opened my eyes to a whole new approach to solving the Dilemma. Much of your work focused on a particular conception of God—understood in the Anselmian sense. What are some of the reasons for the philosophical power of this notion of God?
Morris: Thanks for your kind compliment. And I’m always pleasantly surprised to hear about my work influencing or helping someone. Now, about that conception of God: Well, for one thing, it’s the most extreme idea imaginable, isn’t it? And whatever else is true of me, I’m a person of extremes. I’ve been known to find a new restaurant and love the meal so much that I would go back and eat there every night for two weeks. When I decided to start working out hard at the gym, I committed to two hours a day, every day, for the first year. I do extremes. It’s my great strength and weakness. Extremes intrigue me.
The idea of the greatest possible being, a maximally perfect individual—you can’t get any more extreme than that. It’s a sort of absolute ideal for a philosopher. And any attempt to understand and apply it has got to lead to discoveries all over the place. I found it very attractive and intriguing. I wanted to give it a new level of rigorous and creative attention, as a unifying idea of great importance for philosophical theology and then perhaps for other specialties as well. I felt like, if we understood the core idea of perfect being theology deeply enough and logically enough, we’d get answers to problems that would otherwise be unavailable. And I think I was right.
Baggett: What led to your leaving Notre Dame after 15 years, situated as you were as one of the brightest among a set of premier philosophers making up what was one of the best philosophy departments in the world? What do you miss most, and least, about academia?
Morris: When I was approached long ago out of the blue by Disney to make TV commercials for Winnie the Pooh, as a philosopher, I was so surprised and I was delighted to be reaching out beyond the classroom, especially to promote a most philosophical bear. The two network commercials I got to costar in, with the Pooh characters, brought a surprising amount of attention my way. Various area business and civic groups had been asking me to come and speak on ethics and success, and other topics for a couple of years. And I would always say yes, to build bridges between the university and the community. Then word started to spread. NBC Sports had me speak to their sponsors at every Notre Dame home football game. The Young Presidents Organization began to ask me to give talks to presidents of companies all over the world. Then, when the Pooh hit the fan, when the commercials started showing five or six times a day on all the networks, everybody got interested in this strange guy, part philosopher, and part TV pitchman.
Quickly, I published my first general audience trade book, True Success: A New Philosophy of Excellence, and I was soon getting invitations to speak everywhere. My wife would pick me up from the airport for my morning freshman Philosophy 101 class. I’d teach, have lunch, then do a senior afternoon class, and head back to the airport for another trip and another talk somewhere in America or beyond. As this grew in momentum and I saw people in every business and walk of life get excited about the wisdom of the ages, I began to feel a sense of calling, almost Abrahamic in nature, to leave the known for an unknown promised land where I was meant to grow and serve and prosper intellectually in new ways. I had started all this with no clue that people actually PAID speakers. Then it became a real business. It was hard to teach full time and also serve the world in this new way. I felt I had to make a choice. I dearly loved my students and my academic work, but felt so strongly that this was the next adventure, that I left the full professorship, the tenure, and all its guarantees for this big new challenge and joy.
Norman Kretzmann, Sage Professor of Philosophy at Cornell (you have to love that title), who had been a sort of informal mentor and great encourager to me, wrote me a nice letter at the time urging me not to leave the world of philosophical theology just to go and popularize philosophy for the masses. I wrote back and told him that the new challenges were just as tough, even without requiring modal logic. If people had already figured out happiness, struggle, change, and success, there wouldn’t be an ongoing steady stream of new books on these issues. And I was going to be the first philosopher ever to bring the best rigors of analytic training to bear on such matters, at least in modern times. I felt I had a shot at making a big difference to people’s everyday lives, not something that was even on the radar screen when penning a piece for The Philosophical Review, or The American Philosophical Quarterly. I had experienced and enjoyed serving the 126 people in the world who could read my technical work, the 37 who would, and the 4 or 5 who actually understood it well enough to be persuaded. Of course, I’m kidding. It was more like 3. In any case, I was ready for the new assignment that I was being given.
When I resigned from Notre Dame, I wrote a long letter to the campus newspaper telling all my students that I was leaving not because I had found something more important than they were to me, but because they had prepared me for a new mission that I was being called to launch out on, and that I would always deeply appreciate and treasure the time I had with them for those many years in South Bend.
What I miss most about academia is the time I had to see my students grow in wisdom and understanding throughout a semester and beyond. What I miss least is excessively long faculty meetings, unspoken professional resentments, and the manifest irritation of certain formerly affable colleagues who had decided that, as an exuberant public philosopher, I was no longer to be greeted in the hallway or spoken to in any way, unless absolutely necessary. They must have thought that what my kids called my “Pooh-losophy” could be dangerously contagious.
— David Baggett is the author or editor of about fifteen books, most recently The Moral Argument: A History, with Jerry Walls. Starting in the fall of 2020 he and his wife will be teaching at Houston Baptist University.
*This interview originally appeared at moralapologetics.com.
Book Highlight
*One of the greatest points of conflict between the Christian worldview and contemporary Western culture is the issue of sexuality—especially homosexuality, and more recently, transgender identity. In order to engage with these issues, it is important to acquaint oneself with the biblical, theological, philosophical, and scientific considerations that play a role in the debate. It’s also very helpful to carefully think through the arguments of those who take non-evangelical views on these matters so that we truly understand what people are saying, and why.
Understanding Transgender Identities: Four Views is a very helpful survey of the major Christian viewpoints, presented by four different proponents of these views, which range from a rejection of transgender as an identity, to a full embrace of it. Each of the four contributors also responds to the others, which provides the benefit of seeing how each position stands up to critique. Finally, the editors have written a substantial introduction that surveys the background, vocabulary, and key psychological and scientific theories that have given rise to the current discussion.
"Every Christian leader needs to think through questions related to transgender identities and experiences. Every Christian leader, therefore, needs to read this book and humbly and critically consider the various views. Paul Eddy and James Beilby have put together a thoughtful team of scholars addressing some of the most important ethical questions facing the church today."
— Preston Sprinkle, president of the Center for Faith, Sexuality, and Gender
James K. Beilby (PhD, Marquette University) is professor of systematic and philosophical theology at Bethel University in St. Paul, Minnesota. He has written or edited numerous books, including Thinking about Christian Apologetics. Beilby is the coeditor (with Paul Rhodes Eddy) of six successful multiview volumes, including Understanding Spiritual Warfare: Four Views.
Paul Rhodes Eddy (PhD, Marquette University) is professor of biblical and theological studies at Bethel University in St. Paul, Minnesota. He is the author, coauthor, or editor of a number of books, including Across the Spectrum. Eddy is the coeditor (with James K. Beilby) of six successful multiview volumes, including Understanding Spiritual Warfare: Four Views.
Read an extended excerpt from the introduction here.
Find Understanding Transgender Identities: Four Views at Amazon, Baker, and other major booksellers.
* This is a sponsored post.
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