The History of Human Thought, the Meaning of Life, and … More Cake

Philosopher Elizabeth Anderson wants you to reconsider your relationship to cake. Say you’re at a dinner party, eyeing a platter upon which sits the last slice of dark chocolate cake (or funfetti, or vanilla buttercream, or carrot). No one has claimed it. You’ve already had a slice, and you want another so badly that you can nearly taste it. But you don’t reach over the guest beside you to grab that last piece of cake. Something stops you—but it’s not your appetite. 

“People are often reluctant to take the last piece of cake at a dinner party. Oh, I should let someone else do it, I shouldn’t be greedy. But they want the cake! This isn’t really moral; it’s more like social pressure to behave certain ways,” says Anderson, the John Dewey Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy and Women’s and Gender Studies, professor of law, Arthur F. Thurnau Professor in the Department of Philosophy, and a MacArthur “Genius.” The ambiguity around situations like this, and what they have to do with satisfying well-being, fascinate her. “Thoughts like that led me to philosophy.” 

Anderson began her academic career as an economics major at Swarthmore College, but she traces the start of her interest in philosophy to a course she took as an undergraduate, called the “History and Philosophy of Science.”

Anderson immersed herself in understanding “two big real-world conflicts in the early 17th century. One was about the authority of the church and Christian orthodoxy and the wars of religion following the Reformation.” The other big conflict involved the scientific discoveries of the time: Copernicus’s then-controversial argument that the Earth rotates around the Sun instead of the reverse.

Anderson says that these two conflicts rippled through people’s lives, raising questions about authority, truth, and reality.

“Once I saw that there were real-world applications of these metaphysical and epistemological concepts, then everything made sense. There were direct practical applications to politics and disputes over authority.”

Contemporary philosophers, like Anderson and her colleagues in the department, continue to grapple with big questions about politics, authority, and truth, in turn advancing our understanding of the world today.

Currently, Anderson is examining a European model of workplace governance—“co-determination, in which two levels of governance give workers a voice alongside shareholders … and workers also have a voice on the floor—safety technology, design of work processes, division of tasks amongst workers.” We might consider how workers’ jobs would differ at Costco (which isn’t exactly the co-determination model, but close, Anderson says), where they have more power and autonomy, from a job at Kroger (which, like most U.S. businesses, is far from a co-determination model), where they have less of a voice, structurally speaking. Photo courtesy of ©John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation—used with permission

Let’s take a moment to define some terms before we go further. As described by Anderson’s colleague, philosophy department chair Tad Schmaltz, “metaphysics, or the investigation of what is real and the basic elements that make things up in the world,” emerged first with ancient philosophers like Plato and Aristotle.

In the 17th century, during the Scientific Revolution, the work of philosophers like Francisco Suárez, René Descartes, and Baruch Spinoza, who asked questions about how humans might bridge the image of the world in physics and the sciences with what we call “common sense,” pushed the metaphysical conversation from a scholarly concern into a wider world.

And epistemology? Anderson defines the term as “the theory of knowledge and how we get it.” How do we know if something is true or not? What is the basis of our beliefs? 

She shares a relevant example: “You read something on social media. How do you know if that’s true or not? When ideas and information circulate, what gets taken up as true or false?” She offers another insight about the epistemology of Instagram factoids: “This links into the ways we process information. Empirical studies show us that on social media, falsehoods travel twice as fast as truth. If you’re scrolling social media for news you’re going to be fed untruth. So, get your news from reputable sources.”

Schmaltz shares an awkward conversation in which he often finds himself stuck. 

“People say, So, what is philosophy? Why is it important? If I say that I am directly involved in AI research, then people say, Oh, yeah, that’s important. But if I say that I do history of philosophy, people say, Why do you do that?” The philosophy chair gives a weary sigh.

Indeed, a philosophy degree is hot in tech right now. A recent New York Times story highlighted an urgent workforce demand for philosophers to navigate ethical questions in the field of AI. And those Silicon Valley jobs pay well.

Anderson says that AI abounds with ethical issues that philosophers are poised to tackle—questions about authorship and vibe coding, hallucinatory errors and vulnerability to hacking, and even the effects on the workplace.

Schmaltz agrees that AI is both a timely and philosophical issue. “We can do things with AI, but should we? What are the constraints? What are the scientific issues of how it works? How should it work in society? Already we are talking about value and social politics … and [throughout history,] when we have not thought about these issues, the results have been disastrous.” He cites the development of weapons with devastating consequences for humanity. “There are considerations,” he says, “that go beyond what we can do technically to what we should be doing.”

The history of philosophy’s value is intrinsic. Tad Schmaltz says that “history gives awareness of the cultural and political input into social influences. How much authority do we give scientific sources of knowledge or value-oriented perspectives when we think about the world, and do we need to rethink our assumptions when we are making determinations?” Photography by Daryl Marshke/Michigan Photography

While there is a demonstrated value in the job market for philosophers, Schmaltz says that there’s much more to the discipline. 

“I want to put a plug in for the intrinsic value of history. Opening up different ways of thinking about the world is just valuable. It’s not just what it does for contemporary problems, and, well, I think that it does have a contribution to make in terms of contemporary problems, but I think learning about the history of philosophy gives us a wider sense of the human situation. It takes you out of yourself and exposes you to very different ways of thinking about the world. There is intrinsic value in broadening horizons, in thinking, in becoming a more well-rounded, sophisticated person.”

Schmaltz revisits the Scientific Revolution in the 17th century and how it transformed human thought with modern philosophy. “It’s misguided not to want to understand how we used to think before all of these changes and revolutions,” he says. “It’s important also to recapture why people thought the way they did before the Scientific Revolution. Why did people—during the Medieval period, the Ancient Greeks—think a certain way about the world for millennia?” 

“Because of anxieties about the job market, students are pressed to think about payoff,” says Victor Caston, professor of philosophy, classical studies, and medieval and early modern studies. “Humanists have been right to say that the training we give you will pay off monetarily within 10 years, especially with AI now. But that’s not the point. It’s about making a life that’s meaningful.” 

Philosophy is particularly useful in midlife, Caston quips, when a person might stop and think, What am I doing?

The questions of 17th century modern philosophy led Anderson to pursue what she calls “a much more empirically grounded philosophy,” unbounded by a single discipline. Anderson found that the study of philosophy allowed her to “get closer to more conceptual precision around slippery concepts” than she would have found by focusing only on economics. And that rigor appealed to her curiosity. 

“One of my issues around economics is the systematic importance of social relationships in reducing everything to a market transaction. We have lots of social interaction that is not governed by market norms.” (The cake scenario at the dinner party is just one example of the many factors that drive our social interactions.)

Now, Anderson’s work draws on several disciplines within the social sciences and humanities, such as economics, history, political science, psychology, and women’s and gender studies, in order to arrive at findings for what she calls the “practical, real-world questions that we face on the ground … [some of them being] contested questions of race, gender inequality, democracy, and labor.” These topics are inextricable from contemporary life, and personal to Anderson, too: In 1993, she became the first woman in Michigan’s philosophy department to earn tenure internally.

Anderson uses philosophy to investigate concepts like freedom, egalitarianism, and the workplace, inviting readers to reexamine their roles and their agency within social systems. “One of the jobs of philosophers,” Anderson says, “is to inject ideas that have remarkable staying power and can build over time.”

Philosophy is not about the bottom line, Victor Caston tells his students. “One of the things we give students in humanities are meaningful texts that they can engage with and a way of raising questions and thinking, skills like being able to read closely and critically, to be able to write expressively and think through ideas. … It’s about making a life that’s meaningful.” Photography by Daryl Marshke/Michigan Photography

Caston likes to open his first-year survey with a conversation about happiness. To get his students thinking on the topic, he shares a dialogue between 5th century theologian Augustine and his fictional student Evodius.

Augustine: What about the unhappy life? Is there any way in which you can escape the conclusion that it is to be avoided?

Evodius: I do not think there is anything else to do.

Augustine: But surely you don’t think that a praiseworthy life should be avoided?

Evodius: Indeed, I think it should be eagerly sought.

Augustine: Therefore, the life that is praiseworthy is not unhappy.

So, what makes a happy life? A praiseworthy one? The answers to these questions might be more complicated than we initially believe. Caston shares that his first-year students often agree with both of Evodius’s replies to Augustine: that they should avoid unhappiness, but at the same time seek a praiseworthy life. 

But when Caston introduced the dialogue to another generation during a class he once offered for Parents’ Weekend, most would also disagree with Augustine’s conclusion, though a few disagreed with Evodius, arguing that a praiseworthy life may contain moments of unhappiness. As much as we would like to avoid unhappiness, we can’t. And sometimes a life’s unhappy turns are part of a path toward meaning. The parents offer up examples: Sleepless nights with a colicky baby. Helping out a friend who is in trouble.

Caston himself doesn’t share his personal answers with the room. But he would say that this question of happiness ties into other questions about the process of finding meaning.

“The value of philosophy,” Caston says, “is to get away from focusing solely on conclusions, on the bottom line, on the truth of that statement. … [Instead, we] focus on questions and reasons, consequences, kinds of arguments, and getting a deeper understanding of what the words actually mean. … It’s not just about takeaways or forming consensus.

“Philosophers are not worried about disagreeing with each other,” Caston says. “They want to explain and explore, enter the process of pulling things apart and appreciating and understanding what is there.”

Schmaltz would agree. He came to philosophy via a middle school dream of becoming a lawyer. He was fascinated by the arguments made in the Supreme Court, and as a teenager in a humanities program at Huron High in Ann Arbor, he became interested in how legal arguments were impacted by history, literature, and philosophy. “I loved bringing ideas together,” he says. His inquiry still follows multiple lines of interaction and traces the history of thought.

“What we think is conditioned by social and political structures,” Schmaltz says. “And studying the history of philosophy gives us awareness of cultural and political input into social influences. How much authority do we give scientific sources of knowledge, or value-oriented perspectives, when we think about the world?”

Without the humanities, Caston says, “students will be ill-equipped to meet the challenges of life. It’s not just about having the time and freedom to read great books. It’s about having a good life. Who would question the practicality of that?”