Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

August 26, 2024

Abigail Arnold | Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

Jorah Dannenberg is the newest faculty member in Brandeis University’s Department of Philosophy. His work focuses on the area of moral philosophy. He spoke to the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences about what he studies and why it matters, arriving in Massachusetts after a lifetime in California, and what he likes about Brandeis so far.

What’s your academic background, and how did you find yourself at Brandeis?

I was born and raised in California and studied at Pomona College as an undergraduate and UCLA as a graduate student. I then worked at Stanford University for just over twelve years as a postdoc and then a faculty member. I’m something of a unicorn in academia in that I’ve spent my entire life up until now in California! However, when I looked at this role, I knew that Brandeis had a fantastic reputation for having a small but really excellent Philosophy department. I knew one current faculty member personally and several by reputation, and I had also met several former Brandeis MA students (including one who went on to the PhD program at Stanford). A job opened up in my area, and I was very excited to apply. I was thrilled to get it and am really, really happy to be starting in the role.

How did you become interested in moral philosophy, and what does your research focus on?

I fell in love with philosophy as an undergraduate. For me, college was a wonderful experience, but, like many people, I experienced lots of ups and downs - lots of changes, growth, and development. Early on, I didn’t feel so at home in what I was doing as a student, but the exception to that feeling was always philosophy. I got to think about the questions I was going to stay up at night thinking about anyway, reading from great texts and learning from philosophy professors who always encouraged me to dispute the answers being offered if I didn’t agree or wasn’t convinced. It was too good!

Philosophy covers lots of territory, and I’ve always found a wide array of topics fascinating. But my attention is always drawn back to issues in ethics and politics.

My own research is divided (roughly) into three clusters. The first of these I’d call “the ethics of communication and commitment.” Here, I think about topics like promises, trust, truth-telling, lies, and deception. I’m especially interested in these topics when they require bringing together different parts of philosophy. Things like promises, for instance, are interesting to philosophers of language, to epistemologists, and to those of us more focused on ethics.

I often get interested in a topic because I think there’s a really hard ethical question and nobody else’s answers really satisfy me, though at first I’m not exactly sure why. Philosophy is kind of about trying to figure out why something is bothering you – it’s a field that’s a good fit for people like me who are sometimes irritated by things and can’t let go of them, in a good way!

There’s a second cluster of my research, where I try to address more abstract questions about the relationship between our rational and emotional sides. The debates on this topic beginning in the Enlightenment era really animate me. Should we aspire to live the life of reason? Or do we live better by relating to our reason as a very helpful tool, but not in itself the key to living a good life? I find myself on the side of people who say the latter. But that kind of answer can be hard to defend nowadays in moral philosophy; I think the field has a prejudice in favor of more “rationalistic” answers in ethics.

This led me to a third cluster of work, where I’m thinking more about philosophical methodology: what is it about how we do moral and political philosophy nowadays that makes it harder to defend the less rationalistic approach? More generally, how might biases of all sorts be built into the way we ask questions in moral philosophy, or how we arrange and organize the field?

What makes your research important to society?

Shortly after the 2016 election, I was chairing a conference session and introducing myself to a philosopher I hadn’t met before. He asked what I worked on and I said I was working on something about the importance of truth telling and lies and deception. He said, “Oh! So it’s a historical project!”

In all seriousness, I think the importance of moral and political philosophy should always be pretty evident - whenever it’s not clear why it matters to society, that’s a sign that we aren’t doing our job all that well (which certainly can happen)! Here’s just one example: questions about why it’s important for us to be able to trust one another, but also about why it can be so difficult to do so, strike me as pretty clearly important right now.

What do you think are the strengths of Brandeis's grad program in Philosophy? What are you looking forward to about teaching here this semester?

Brandeis’s master’s program has a very strong reputation as one of a handful of places where students who are interested in going on to a PhD receive excellent preparation. I’ve served on a few PhD admissions committees over the years, and they are always looking to see that people will thrive. For students coming from Brandeis, people trust they will. I also have the sense that Brandeis does a good job of trying to strike the right balance between introducing students to the professionalization that’s necessary for thriving in academic philosophy (things like publishing articles and attending conferences), but also letting students swim in the subject so that they can fall in love with it… and out of love with it… and back in love again. Finally, I think those of us who are academic philosophers often have a constrained view of what you can do with a philosophy degree, but the department here is also thinking about other things people can do and ways they can benefit from the degree.

I am teaching a mixed graduate and undergraduate course on truth and trust this semester. I am looking forward to meeting my fifteen or so students and spending the next semester talking with them about these really interesting questions! I will get to share what I know, but, in a way, teaching moral philosophy is more about trying to puzzle through questions that no one has any more inherent authority to answer than anyone else. I’m looking forward to seeing where they want to go with the material. I will loosely organize the course around a series of puzzles that arise in this area. One puzzle is about trust itself. Trust involves making yourself vulnerable to another – someone can harm you more when they betray your trust. But it is something we actively seek out in our lives and wouldn’t want to live without. When our trust is well placed, we feel more secure, even though we’re much more vulnerable. What’s up with all that?

What else would you like to share as a new member of the Brandeis community?

From every experience I’ve had at Brandeis thus far - from my very first Zoom interview with my now colleagues onward - the sense of genuine community here has been manifest. Brandeis feels to me like a place that people really want to be a part of. It seems true of faculty, students, and staff - everyone here. I’m honored to join this place, and I’m excited to get to know Brandeis and everyone here in the coming years!