A Brush with Fame

26 January 2023

In my PY1012 Reasoning lecture this evening, I used a slide with a photo of Sally Haslanger and a short section from her book Resisting Reality to give an example of an argument to a universal generalisation. (I’ve been teaching reasoning using examples from throughout the philosophical canon.)

After class a young student came up to me, all excited, asking: do you know Professor Haslanger!? (I had described her as a colleague.) I explained that yes, we’d met and I’d known her for some time. She reacted as if I had been in the presence of a rock star, and that she was now a little bit closer to true greatness as a result. When I said I loved Sally’s work, and then added that Kate Manne had been a student of mine at the University of Melbourne before she went to MIT to study with Sally, the student was absolutely beside herself.

It’s a delight to exploit my own personal contacts with colleagues and friends, to help a student feel a little closer to what she truly treasures in the sometimes humdrum matter of teaching intro reasoning.