By Andrea Scarpino
Los Angeles
You may have heard that Los Angeles is burning to the ground. And it kind of is: 130,000 acres have already burned. Where I live, the fires mostly mean tall plumes of gray and white smoke rolling down the hills, ash on the cars and air that makes my lungs ache.
I have spent the past few days of fire reading Zac’s work. He’s in the final stages of completing a Ph.D. in philosophy, and needed to send a significant chunk of his dissertation to his committee this week. So I read each chapter, writing comments about clarity, adding commas that I might have deleted in an earlier draft, making big red question marks everywhere I got lost. This is what I do for a living, after all: read unfinished work and try to help it be as strong as it can be.
With Zac, though, I’m afraid I’m not a very good teacher. I don’t know the literature within which he works, so I ask stupid questions, move sentences around because I want them to sound better, push him for clarity that another philosopher probably wouldn’t need. Twice, this week, I asked him to rewrite sections of his dissertation as if he were writing for an audience of six-year olds. Degrading? Maybe. But the clarity of his rewriting was much improved. Multiple times, I asked him to talk me through what he was trying to write in a particular section, and as he talked, I said, Write that down! And that. He complained that he had already made those points clear, but since I didn’t understand them, I made him write them down again anyway.
Philosophers are taught to think of themselves as practicing the master doctrine. A Ph.D., after all, is a Philosophy Doctorate; no matter if your degree is in English or History or French, if you have a Ph.D., your degree contains the word “philosophy.” Zac is the most humble philosopher I’ve ever met, but I still don’t think he’s the biggest fan of printing a chapter for me that he thinks is complete, only to have it returned with grammatical corrections and question marks in red pen (no one thinks of poetry as the master doctrine, by the way, but I firmly believe the world would be a better place if we did). So we talked and defended our positions. Sometimes I conceded, sometimes he did.
And as fire raged around the city, we engaged in the fine pursuits of philosophy and writing, of writing philosophy, of philosophizing the written word. I hope Zac’s dissertation will be stronger because of my critiques. I hope his committee will see the brilliance in his thinking. Mostly though, I hope we have many more weeks like this one, arguing over intuitions and examples, points of clarity, the ordering of paragraphs. I hope we can always argue philosophy and writing without taking our arguments or each other too seriously. And I hope that we remember, when the fires are burning outside our doors, to hunker down and think seriously about the world.
Andrea Scarpino is the west coast Bureau Chief of POTB. You can visit her at:
Planet of the Blind 
how lucky that zac has you! as a PhD, i agree – there’s so much to think about – the world, and our place in it, etc. Glad you were able to help him clarify – and best of luck to him!!
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