If you know anything about me you might be wondering how I ended up studying more philosophy. (“…wait” you might be thinking, “why would I know anything about you? a random author of some blog I found online?” to which the answer is that at the time of writing the only people reading this are a handful of my university friends and my mum - hi mum!)
Anyway, if you’re one of that handful of university friends or my mum you might say something like “you already spent four years doing a very theoretical undergrad course featuring a lot of philosophy, and you somehow still managed to talk your way into a job that pays you money to do useful things, why stress yourself out with more weird theoretical academic stuff?”.
This is essentially also what the hiring manager who offered me that job asked me when I brought up the subject of part time philosophy study, with a worried look in her eyes like the mere suggestion caused her to re-evaluate the whole recruitment process up until that point. “And what” she asked after a long pause “would you do if you found you couldn’t manage both?”.
“I don’t know,” I said “…maybe start a blog?” which I guess is the first time I formally pitched the thing you’re reading today.
A month or so later my old undergraduate supervisor would ask me pretty much the opposite question, perhaps somewhat hurt by the implication that there was anything left for me to learn in such a structured way after 4 years under his wing. “Why waste your time with another master’s degree, don’t you feel like we’ve prepared you enough to start a PHD?”
The short answer to both questions was that, aside from the stressful final exams at the end, I had loved my undergraduate course and wanted to do what I could to keep all the best bits of it in my life once I graduated. A lot of it was the fantastic degree of flexibility for students to mix and match computer science and philosophy modules together to make their own ideal curriculum. In a similar way I had always hoped to continue studying philosophy part time after graduating and starting work as a software engineer.
But, at first, I took the advice I was given. For my first year of full time work this meant spending my evenings organising and attending reading groups, having several false starts for part-time PHD applications, and occasionally writing some some unstructured ideas into my phone's notes app.
The first problem with this approach was that: full time jobs are kind of a big deal! Having a job takes up a lot of your time and energy, and especially the kind of energy that you normally spend on essential logistical things like making sure everyone shows up to the next reading group session, or following up on that email to a prospective PHD supervisor. The second problem with this approach was that these things all encouraged me to go super deep into one small set of topics or questions, while I still felt like what I wanted to do was pursue a series of parallel and often divergent philosophical threads and, in the process, get less confused about the core topics that seemed to come up again and again when you do that.
If only there were some way to study a broader range of fundamental philosophy topics in a structured way! Thinking back, there were so many modules to choose from during my 4 year undergrad+masters course, and so many topics in each module that I felt I could have gone back and taken the whole thing again without ever really learning the same thing twice. With this in mind, and after noticing that there was minimal overlap with things I had already studied, I finally enrolled myself in the Open University's MA in Philosophy, and began attending my first lectures for it at the end of 2019.
This is the bit where I tell you how cool a place the Open University turned out to be, feel free to skip it if you know all about it.
To start with, the Open University has a fascinating history. Based in the UK, it was founded by the Labour led government in 1969 and was run out of the BBC's abandoned broadcasting tower in Alexandra Palace as a way to provide high quality higher education opportunities for a wider range of people. It did this by deploying the height of modern technology to reach as many people as possible. In the 70s this meant broadcasting lectures over radio or television and holding tutorials you could dial into on a telephone. Today it means a wealth of online interactive material, and video streamed lectures with live chat rooms.
Other people studying for courses like mine included a diverse demographic of retired pensioners, young professionals, members of the armed forces, prisoners and full time students who'd decided they preferred a distance model of teaching (once the COVID-19 pandemic started I'm certain these students were pleased to find themselves in one of the only universities in the UK that was already prepared to teach remotely). All our lectures took place online and the course materials were very high quality, as was the thoughtful feedback on my written work from the tutors. The other students were all passionate, engaged and thoughtful - it felt like nobody was there because they had to be or because they had something to prove, everyone was doing this purely for themselves.
Was it a bunch more work? Yes, 100%. But now all my energy was going into the thing I wanted to do more of: reading and writing on a broad range of philosophical topics and getting regular feedback about whether I was doing a good job.
I still haven't decided what I want to do to keep studying now that this course is complete. Starting this blog is a part of figuring that out I guess.
Would I recommend someone else does something like this? It depends mostly on how much you like the subject you plan to study and how much the things holding you back from studying more of it are structure and regular feedback. For me: I was always going to enjoy reading philosophy papers on the train in to work in the mornings, and I benefitted a lot from being given concrete topics to find and read papers about and being told to write up my thoughts on them by certain date.
Its also worth mentioning that my job was already very demanding and that on a handful of occasions it had to take priority over this part-time degree. The Open University tutors were always very understanding with deadline extensions.
A final thing to bear in mind is that I tell nearly everyone who asks me that the pandemic saved me from having to choose between doing part-time study and having a social life: it meant that my social commitments plummeted to near-zero just when I was starting to wonder how to prioritize between seeing friends and writing up my dissertation. I’m increasingly skeptical that this was a real trade off though: studying philosophy has always been a very social activity for me - people love to talk about big questions and even people with very little exposure to philosophy seem to have a lot of time for hearing me talk them through what I’ve been reading about most recently. So in somewhat cheesy hindsight it’s just as possible that enrolling in this course back in 2019 saved me from the pandemic and not the other way around.