Hello, I’m Shelley Tremain, and I would like to welcome you to the one hundred and eleventh installment of Dialogues on Disability, the series of interviews that I am conducting with disabled philosophers and post to BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY on the third Wednesday of each month. The series is designed to provide a public venue for discussion with disabled philosophers about a range of topics, including their philosophical work on disability; the place of philosophy of disability vis-à-vis the discipline and profession; their experiences of institutional discrimination and exclusion, as well as personal and structural gaslighting in philosophy in particular and in academia more generally; resistance to ableism, racism, sexism, and other apparatuses of power; accessibility; and anti-oppressive pedagogy.

The land on which on which I sit to conduct these interviews is the traditional ancestral territory of the Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabeg nations. The territory was the subject of the Dish with One Spoon Wampum Belt Covenant, an agreement between the Iroquois Confederacy and the Ojibwe and allied nations around the Great Lakes. As a settler, I offer these interviews with respect for and in solidarity with Indigenous peoples of so-called Canada and other settler states who, for thousands of years, have held sacred the land, water, air, and sky, as well as their inhabitants, and who, for centuries, have struggled to protect them from the ravages and degradation of colonization and expropriation.

My guest today is Paul Lodge. Paul is a professor of philosophy at Oxford University. Much of his career has been devoted to the philosophy of G. W. Leibniz about whom he’s written numerous articles as well as translating and editing/co-editing five books, including The Leibniz-De Volder Correspondence (Yale, 2013) and Leibniz: Journal Articles on Philosophy (Oxford, forthcoming). Since 2020 he has also been working with other philosophers to explore various aspects of issues that are referred to using terms such as mental illness, neurodiversity, and madness.

Welcome back to Dialogues on Disability, Paul! You did a pathbreaking interview with me in July 2020. Please bring us up to date on developments in your career.

It’s very much a tale of two halves. I have continued my work as an historian of seventeenth century philosophy, in part because it is what I am called upon to teach in Oxford; introducing students to the thought of this period is something that gives me great pleasure. I continue to be drawn mainly to working through my interpretation of Leibniz’s philosophy, which still feels like it will be a life-long project.

Shortly after my previous interview, I published a volume of papers (co-edited with Lloyd Strickland) called Leibniz Key Philosophical Writings: A Guide, which was designed to help people navigate some of Leibniz’s central works for the first time and completed a volume of translations (with three other translators, Richard Francks, Antonia LoLordo and the late Roger Woolhouse) which will appear next year. I have also continued to publish essays on Leibniz, including a chapter on Leibniz’s book the Theodicy for the co-edited volume, a journal article called “Leibniz’s Philosophy as a Way of Life?”, and a couple of other articles in which I argue that some of his writings provide evidence for a kind of mystical foundation for his philosophy.

Each of these in its own way invites the reader to try on Leibniz’s philosophy for size in light of attempts to present his “optimism” in the way that I think it seemed to him. I am not aiming to defend what he says, but I do want to make the case that it arises from a much more sensitive awareness of the challenges posed by the reality of evil than popular conceptions invite.

More relevant to our current conversation are the ways in which I’ve brought my academic life into a public relationship with being a mad and autistic person. Most of this occurs in day-to-day situations. I have become very open with people about my bipolar diagnosis, and more latterly my autism spectrum condition diagnosis. I slip them into conversation wherever there’s an appropriate opening―or at least where it seems to me that there is! Crucially, I tell my students before I start teaching them and try to ensure that colleagues with whom I am going to have more than a casual acquaintance are aware of my diagnoses as well. In the case of the students, I also point them to resources where they can find out more about some of the ways in which people with these diagnoses might be neurodivergent.

The responses to my previous interview have been a bit of a mixed bag. I have found that some of the students have really appreciated it; and every time I get an email to that effect it’s seemed like reason enough. Some colleagues have been great, but it’s obvious that for others it’s not a comfortable thing to hear. For the most part that’s felt OK. But I’d be lying if I claimed that I no longer feel exposed or worried that people will think less of me when that happens.

[Description of image below: Paul, who is a white man with a closely-cropped beard and moustache, looks directly into the camera lens against a blurred background.]

There are other things that being open about my neurodivergence has led me to notice. As is the case with many other universities, there’s lots of talk about the mental well-being of students at the moment at Oxford. Nonetheless, people still don’t seem to have much of a sense of what to do with neurodivergent academics. Luckily, I do now have a few friends in other departments who publicly identify, and we’ve just started an interdisciplinary Neurodiversity Research Network with a two-year grant from the Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH). I am hopeful that will provide a forum not just for research discussion, but also the solidarity required to engage with some of these local political issues.

One of the best things about our previous interview from my perspective is that the publicity it brought has led to my making connections with other neurodivergent and mad philosophers. It’s been such a pleasure and privilege and has led to a number of different kinds of collaborations. For example, in 2021, Zsuzsanna Chappell, Sofia Jeppsson, and I (though they really should take most of the credit) organized a virtual workshop called “Philosophy of Psychiatry and Lived Experience.” Our main motivation was to provide a safe space in which people who had lived experience of neurodivergence and/or madness could discuss work in progress together. Anyone who is interested in more details about the workshop can go to a two-part blog post (here and here) that Zsuzsanna wrote after the third workshop of its kind was held in 2023.

Having had the experience of running an online workshop together, Sofia and I then took the plunge and decided to try to organize a full-blown hybrid conference based in Oxford. We were able to obtain grants from the Wellcome Trust funded Renewing Phenomenological Psychopathology project and the Oxford Philosophy Faculty, and, thus, assembled a group of people from around the world to speak to the theme “Madpeople’s Coping Mechanisms.” The conference took as a starting point the fact that “madpeople” are a massively heterogenous group, even where they share similar diagnoses.

The presentations focussed on the various strategies the people have developed to live with their experiences (for full details see here). Most of the people who presented at the conference were philosophers, but there were others, including a psychologist, a mental health worker, and activists. A musician and poet duo also performed. The conference papers discussed these themes (among others): beginning to heal after recognising past trauma; not engaging with mental health clinicians who talk of problems as stemming from inside your brain; relying on collective action and peer support instead of facing mental health problems as a lone patient; seeing the positive in, and identifying with, “bad” psychiatric conditions, such as Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD); and intellectual humility and embracing the possibility of error and mistakes as a way of dealing with hallucinations.

Sofia and I are in the process of turning the conference presentations, which were very interesting, into a special edition of International Mad Studies Journal. But, for me, the most rewarding aspect of the event was the way in which it has facilitated community among presenters and those who attended in person and online. We asked people to give us feedback afterwards and among the comments were the following: 

“The conference organisers should be congratulated … for the care they took to include academic, activist, new, and established voices. In decades of attending academic conferences, Madpeople’s Coping Mechanisms had the most impact, both personally and professionally.“

“Not only did I leave with the satisfaction that I had connected with valuable allies and potential collaborators, but the very nature of the … work that I’ve been doing over the past decade felt validated and nourished in a completely genuine way.”

“This conference was the first time that I had an opportunity to share ideas at the intersection of philosophy and coping with challenges posed by mental health in an environment that was clearly non-judgmental. The presence of others in the room who had similar or at least analogous experiences was exhilarating.“

“It is rare that I get the chance to openly discuss this huge part of my life and healing journey, and to do so in the company of people who understand is indescribably valuable. Creating spaces like this is vital for healing.“

I wanted to quote at length from this feedback because it demonstrates just how important conferences of this kind are. There is a great thirst for this kind of intellectual companionship; the effects of attending such events can be quite profound. One of Sofia’s and my biggest hopes is that others might be able to run similar events of their own.

In addition to organizing events, I have done more writing which has resulted in a couple of papers in the area, the first of which is co-authored with Sofia and emerges from a talk that we gave together at Too Mad to be True, a conference which is now run annually in Ghent. The paper is called “Strategy, Pyrrhonian Scepticism and the Allure of Madness,” which is forthcoming in the European Journal of Analytic Philosophy), comprises a discussion of the way in which both of us have come to embrace living in accord with the Pyrrhonian strategy of suspending belief and how doing so has enabled us to live with our respective madnesses. I have also very recently published an abridged version of these ideas in a brief paper called “Pyrrhonism as a Therapeutic Response to the Allure of Mania.” Whilst we are at pains to stress that this approach is simply one among many, we hope that it might be of use to at least some other people in helping alleviate some of the distress that madness can cause.

Finally, in a less formal way, I wrote a series of blog posts about my own journey toward obtaining my autism spectrum condition diagnosis on the UK National Health Service, a two-year process from initial screening to the reception of the diagnosis. I made the posts primarily to let people know what that process actually entails. Receiving the diagnosis obviously threw up lots of questions for me, as indeed did the decision to seek the diagnosis in the first place. I hope to explore some of those in writing in the future.

Remarks that you made in your previous interview suggest that you have a class analysis of your educational background and current position in the profession. Analysis of how class shapes and conditions philosophy—including what counts as appropriate method and discourse—has begun to garner attention in philosophy. How do you understand the way that class and economic background provide a filter for philosophy?

It’s probably to credit me with more reflection than I have engaged in to call my thoughts on these issues a “class analysis.” However, my perspective on academic philosophy is very much coloured by the fact that I am the product of a state school in West Yorkshire in the North of England. Whilst my dad was the headteacher (principal) at a primary school and my mum also qualified as a teacher, most of my peers growing up were from working class backgrounds and left school at sixteen to go straight into the world of paid work. I probably seemed working class to others when I was an undergraduate in Oxford; but, given my autism, this difference didn’t produce a sense of class-based alienation. The struggles getting on with others pre-dated university and always felt much more rudimentary.

I can’t, then, speak to how class poses a problem for those for whom it is a matter primarily of lived experience. But there are other things that I think my background has led me to find particularly striking, though I speak here only of my experiences working in Britain. UK students must select their subject of study at university very early. Indeed, very few students take courses in anything other than the degree subject chosen when they were seventeen. Needless to say, pupils from working-class backgrounds, and the parents who support them, tend to think of university as a route to financial security. So, the numbers applying to study philosophy have always skewed away from that demographic from outset, which, alone, has a drastic effect on the composition of the profession. But the pressure to take courses that are more readily associated with routes into employment has been made a lot worse due to the biggest change in UK higher education that has taken place since I was a student, namely, the introduction of student fees and the replacement of maintenance grants with loans.

A more recent change is only now beginning to make its presence felt. This change arises from the fact that the UK government has now withdrawn almost all public funding for graduate degrees in the humanities; and what little money exists is offered almost exclusively to those studying for Ph.Ds. In the UK, a masters’ degree is a necessary condition for admission to a Ph.D., and whilst there are loans available for fees, these loans are lower than the fees charged for many courses. Under these conditions, especially when combined with the state of the academic job market, it’s becoming next to impossible for anyone without access to a non-trivial amount of private funding to justify studying for masters’ degrees, let alone Ph.Ds. Indeed, matters are even worse for philosophy than other humanities subjects, since many of the most prestigious masters’ degrees in philosophy, such as our B Phil and the M Phil Stud. courses at places such as University College London and King’s College London are two-year courses. There is a real danger that, within a short time, academic philosophy will be almost exclusively a pastime for the rich.

My only solace in all of this is that philosophy itself has always had a life (often its most interesting life) outside of the academy, as the existence of BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY clearly demonstrates.

Mad philosophy seems to have exploded since your interview four years ago. How would you describe developments in the field? Where do you think it should go from here?

There have, for many years of course, been people identified as philosophers who write about the kinds of things that commonly get regarded as instances of madness. One thing that is perhaps new with this genre of writing is that the word mad has started to appear more frequently. Not long before our last interview, Mohammed Aboulleil Rashed published Madness and the Demand for Recognition: A Philosophical Inquiry into Identity and Mental Health Activism. Since then, there have been other books such as Justin Garson’s Madness: A Philosophical Exploration, and Alastair Morgan’s Continental Philosophy of Psychiatry – The Lure of Madness..

However, I would not myself identify those as works of “mad philosophy”. Although the expression does not have a commonly agreed upon connotation, as a first pass, I would reserve “mad philosophy” for work that takes madness as its subject and is identified/identifiable as philosophy that is also written by people who self-identify as mad and present the work as a product of that. Even here, however, I think in terms of a distinction between “mad philosophy” and “Mad philosophy.”

I’ve been fortunate to have a connection with the Mad Studies community via my friend David Mordecai. There’s much more to be said about the decades of work done by people in that movement. But one obvious lesson to be learned is that we should distinguish between the way in which the term Madness has been used by disability activists, where it has an essentially political valence, and madness, as used to refer a range of modes of being that have been stigmatized and pathologized. And, in light of this, I would (as I suggested) want to distinguish “Mad philosophy” from “mad philosophy,” where the former, unlike the latter, points to a concern with the relation between philosophical thinking and activism. Indeed, I prefer to use the expressions “m/Mad philosophy” and “mad/Mad philosophers” (at least for now).

I have to caveat my thoughts on whether it’s true to say there’s been an explosion in this field and where it might go next, reminding readers that my main academic identity is still as a historian of philosophy, which takes up pretty much all the energy that I have to devote to research. That’s consistent with organizing conferences on m/Mad philosophy and writing the odd paper. Nevertheless, I don’t envision myself ever being much more than a dilettante who writes in ways that do not require detailed knowledge of the literature. I have to confess that I am not very good at keeping up with what others write in this area. So, everything I say at this point has to be prefaced with a huge apology to anyone whose relevant work I remain unfamiliar with.

My sense is that m/Mad philosophy is still very much in its infancy. Wouter Kousters’s A Philosophy of Madness: The Experience of Psychotic Thinking made something of a splash when it was published. But I don’t know of another monograph that has been anywhere near as visible. Although there are now a number of philosophers, including Zsuzsanna, Sofia, Michael Dickson, and Elliot Porter, who have published fascinating and ground-breaking articles in the area, they still seem to me to be relatively few in number. So, I see an emerging field without a strong sense of its identity or what its questions might be.

I have a few thoughts about what some of those questions might be which I will come to in a moment. But more than anything I think m/Mad philosophers still need to find the space to talk with each other in order to create concepts and a philosophical landscape that speaks out of and to m/Madness. It seems crucial to me that that happen, given how much of a risk there is that our thinking of m/Madness will be mediated by the language of the sane that we have learned to speak, and that initial attempts at thinking and speaking will be coopted before they have been tried, tested, and developed by the community of m/Mad philosophers.

To turn quickly to a few concrete questions on which I hope some people might work. The first is deconstructive. For a while now, I have been struck by how puzzling it is that people who do not self-identify as m/Mad nonetheless present work that is labelled “phenomenological psychopathology”. Setting aside worries about the ways in which particular authors in this tradition continue to say quite disturbing things about the m/Mad, it would be great to see someone do careful work on the question of what it could even mean to do phenomenology in this area without the kind of direct access to the relevant phenomena that m/Mad people have.

I’m also interested in what people would end up saying if they were to think in more detail about how different conceptions of “philosophy” would play into what “m/Mad philosophy” might be, and relatedly, I think it would be great if there were more attention paid to the rich tradition of thinking about m/Madness that has been done for decades by people under the “Mad Studies” umbrella.

Another issue which has become pertinent to me in light of my autism spectrum diagnosis is the relationship between m/Madness and other forms of neurodivergence. Finally, I’m particularly interested in the relation between m/Madness and “religious experience”. It would be by no means a novelty in the history of philosophical thinking to consider the two in tandem; but it would great to see more exploration of this from contemporary m/Mad philosophers.

Paul, you frequently perform your music for public audiences. Indeed, your previous interview included a photo of you doing so. Is there a connection between your musical performances and your philosophical work on madness? Do the two activities inform each other in some way? If so, please explain how you understand the relation between them.

I have written and played music since I was a teenager; so, it antedates all my philosophical work by some time. But there is a very direct relationship between my music, philosophy, and my madness. I had not written any new songs for quite a while until I went through the phase of my life that led to my bipolar diagnosis in 1994. During this time, my disposition was “manic” and I was reading anything I could get my hands on, especially writings that were at the more mystical end of philosophy. It was at this point that I wrote three songs, “Brahma,” “Small Country,” and “Foolishness,” which were to provide the basis for my set of songs, Cantat Ergo Sumus, which comprises settings of poems by philosophers.

The songs are intended to serve as a non-didactic invitation to engage with philosophy, where the hope is that the tunes are catchy enough to stick in people’s heads and leave them with that inclination. The title of the project, which alludes to both Descartes and Heidegger, is supposed to invoke a philosophical thought – namely, that we emerge into being together as elements of a cosmic song. I don’t have a clear idea about what should be done with this thought, though it has obvious resonances (pun intended) with Leibniz’s claim that perfection is harmony. However, I have found that my own particular form of madness leaves me able to take great pleasure in entertaining it. One additional thing about musical performance has philosophical significance for me, namely, that it attunes us to the way in which all things are ephemeral. The conceptual openness that underlies the Pyrrhonism that Sofia and I have embraced in response to our madness seems to be manifest in a more fundamental and embodied way as the music comes and goes with no sense of it being an exercise in trying to grasp reality.

Tell us about your upcoming conference in September. What is the motivation for the conference? What do you hope it achieves? Who will be presenting at it?

The conference is called “From Philosophy of m/Madness to m/Mad Philosophy” and will take place in Oxford on September 25-26. Unfortunately, the conference is an in-person only event since I could not get access to hybrid facilities. The motivation for the meeting was my desire to create a space in which people can explore some of the themes that we have already touched in this interview. The use of the two cases for the letter “m” in the title draws on my attempt to distinguish the ways in which philosophizing about madness can have both a speculative and practical/political dimension; and the title as a whole is supposed to point to the difference between philosophizing about m/Madness and philosophizing from the standpoint of m/Madness.

The speakers are all people who self-identify as philosophers, with roughly half who self-identify as mad and half who do not. So, unlike the conference I ran with Sofia last year, this upcoming conference is an attempt to bring the mad and non-mad philosophers of m/Madness into dialogue. Many of the people mentioned above will be coming to present, including: Zsuzsanna Chappell, Justin Garson, Sofia Jeppsson, Alastair Morgan, and Mohammed Aboulleil Rashed. We are also lucky that three other people will join us: Lorna Collins is an artist and philosopher living with the condition, Organic Hallucinosis, who is currently running a project called “A Creative Transformation” in which she uses art and writing to express and understand her hallucinations; Tasia Scrutton, who teaches at Leeds University, and works on the relationship between religious experience and psychopathology; and Shay Welch, who you interviewed last month. Shay teaches at Spelman College and has, among many other fascinating things, done ground-breaking philosophical thinking as someone with a Borderline Personality Disorder diagnosis.

As with all the meetings I organise, whether they concerned with philosophy of m/Madness or otherwise, my main hope is that the upcoming conference will enable us to talk and learn from each other. In this case, luckily, I have been able to assemble a fantastic group of speakers, some of whom will doubtless take very different stances from each other on some of the key issues. So, I am anticipating that both the presenters and other people who come along to participate will leave brimming with ideas about how to move the burgeoning field of philosophy of m/Madness into its next phase.

Paul, how would you like to end this interview? Are there topics or concerns that we have not discussed that you would like to address? Would you like to recommend some books, articles, blogs, or videos that readers and listeners can seek out for more information about the issues that you have addressed?

Mainly, I wanted to end by saying, thanks so much for interviewing me and to say how flattered I am to have been asked to return to Dialogues on Disability. Our first interview played a very important part in my development as a philosopher and person over the past few years; so, it is very nice to be able to reflect again in this way.

I am not a consumer of videos or podcasts about philosophy. So, I can’t really recommend anything of that kind. As far as reading goes, I would simply point to the work of all the people I have mentioned above. That should be more than enough to keep even the keenest reader occupied and richly rewarded for a long time.

Paul, thanks so much for your kind words about Dialogues on Disability and BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY more generally. I’m sure that readers and listeners of this interview will get busy with the slew of recommendations that you provided throughout this interview.

Readers/listeners are invited to use the Comments section below to respond to Paul Lodge’s remarks, ask questions, and so on. Comments will be moderated. As always, although signed comments are preferred, anonymous comments may be permitted.

The entire Dialogues on Disability series is archived on BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY here.

From April 2015 to May 2021, I coordinated, edited, and produced the Dialogues on Disability series without any institutional or other financial support. A Patreon account now supports the series, enabling me to continue to create it. You can add your support for these vital interviews with disabled philosophers at the Dialogues on Disability Patreon account page here.

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Please join me here again on Wednesday, July 17, 2024, for the hundred and twelfth installment of the Dialogues on Disability series and, indeed, on every third Wednesday of the months ahead. I have a fabulous line-up of interviews planned. If you would like to nominate someone to be interviewed (self-nominations are welcomed), please feel free to write me at s.tremain@yahoo.ca. I prioritize diversity with respect to disability, class, race, gender, institutional status, nationality, culture, age, and sexuality in my selection of interviewees and my scheduling of interviews.