Jason Stanley, one of the bright lights of American philosophy, says his expected move to Yale University is “the perfect thing for where I’m going with my work.”
Pending final approval from a panel of the Yale Corporation, the university’s governing board, July 1 will be Mr. Stanley’s first day as a professor of philosophy and linguistics at the Ivy League institution.
Mr. Stanley, 43, is a specialist in philosophy of language, epistemology, and the history of analytic philosophy. He says Yale’s across-the-board strength made him willing to leave his post in the world-class philosophy department at Rutgers University at New Brunswick. Yale’s philosophy department, after struggling in the 1990s, is rising toward the top in various rankings. “It’s small, but it’s stunningly good,” says Mr. Stanley, who joins old friends and colleagues there.
Among specialists in Mr. Stanley’s subfields, “everybody would say he’s one of the best people of his generation,” says Brian Leiter, who founded the University of Chicago Law School’s Center for Law, Philosophy, and Human Values, and writes and manages Leiter Reports: a Philosophy Blog, which is closely watched by philosophers.
After studying in Germany and the United States as an undergraduate, Mr. Stanley took his doctorate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He held a visiting lectureship at the University of Oxford before landing his first long-term position, at Cornell University. From there he was recruited to the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor’s highly ranked philosophy department before moving over to Rutgers.
Even more than Rutgers does, Yale offers Mr. Stanley something he regards as essential to his work: a philosophy department with great breadth, he says, on a campus with leading figures in all the disciplines to which he looks for insights.
The extent of his engagement is a boon to Yale, says Tamar Szabó Gendler, the philosophy chair there: “One of the extraordinary things Jason does,” she says, is to “create natural lines of communication with almost no gaps between linguistics and philosophy, all the way over to people doing work in political theory.”
Mr. Stanley has spent his career pondering such abstractions as knowledge, representation, and intelligent action, along with their implications for the understanding of human behavior and even civic life.
He focuses on fundamental and often age-old issues, like whether a coherent differentiation really exists between knowledge—"knowing that"—and skill—"knowing how.” It doesn’t, he contends.
His reasons are nuanced, as philosophical reasoning often is. But he contends that it is crucial to dismantle the false distinction between practical knowledge and theoretical knowledge because that misapprehension underpins many supposedly settled areas of philosophy.
Time to rethink those areas, he suggests.
He also discusses ways in which he believes the false dichotomy has underpinned thinking even in the humanities, social sciences, and now such emerging fields as cognitive neuroscience.
He sorts through such issues in, for example, his 2011 book from Oxford University Press, Know How, in which he considers the nature of “skills,” and a 2005 publication from the same press, Knowledge and Practical Interests.
Mr. Stanley also considers expressions of the false dichotomy in society, along with many other implications of philosophical thinking, in such venues as the Stone, a section of The New York Times’s Opinionator blog in which philosophers consider “issues both timely and timeless.”
In one article there, he argued that the false division of practical and theoretical capacities, though a fiction, “is used to warehouse society into groups. It alienates and divides.” He has also foreshadowed on the blog the likely subject of his next book: how political speech and rhetoric undermine democracy.
To test his thinking on all the subjects of interest to him, he says, “I wanted to be at a university where I could have access to leading figures across the disciplines in the humanities and social sciences.”
It was fortunate, then, that his wife, Njeri K. Thande, a cardiologist at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, in the Bronx, accepted a position at Yale School of Medicine.
Perfect for him, says Mr. Stanley; being part of the Rutgers community has been difficult because he and his wife have been living in Harlem, 50 miles away from New Brunswick, and have a young child. Her new job made his own quest to join Yale feasible.
But look at Mr. Stanley’s job opportunities this way, suggests Mr. Leiter: “The bottom line is that Jason is able to get offers wherever she lands.”