Dr. Greg Emery is a senior lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at University of Akron, Ohio, USA. On 5 March 2025, he gave a special lecture on the topic "Heidegger’sTypewriter " at MCC. As part of our internship at the Office of International Programmes in MCC, we got the opportunity of interviewing
Dr. Emery on 4 March 2025.
In this interview, questions about the value of philosophy and authenticity of life are discussed along with the unique way in which philosophy students can contribute to today’s world of Artificial Intelligence.
TRANSCRIPTION
Interviewee - Dr. Greg Emery (GE)
Interviewers - Anagha(AN) and Aleena (AL)
AL: According to you, how does philosophy contribute to humanity in today’s world?
GE: So, there are at least two questions there. On the one hand, you are asking what is the value of philosophy. So, this is one of the oldest questions of humanity, and if you go back to the ancient Greeks, they’ll tell you that philosophy is the goal itself. The best philosophy isn’t used for something else, it's not practical. The value is in the philosophy itself. Moving on to the next question, how does it contribute to humanity and society. So, one of the most basic philosophical questions is those concerning the nature of the self, like what does it mean to be authentic? How do I live a good life? And, who am I and what’s my relationship with people and so on. Sometimes, the answers aren't as important as the questions because asking those questions makes a person more mindful of those issues and that raises the quality of a human being. So, on the one hand, it’s wrongheaded, says some philosophers, to value philosophy for what it can do. So, philosophical thinking has its own value in itself. The other answer is that the value of philosophy is probably in being mindful in the asking of the most essential questions of what it means to be. How about that? (Laughs)
AN: Yes, asking the right questions.
AL: How do you think one can lead an authentic life in this digital era?
GE: So, two questions. There is this old joke, it’s said in different ways that, whenever you have two philosophers together, you have 10 different perspectives. So, were you at the presentation yesterday?
AN: No, sir.
GE: So, I talked a little bit about being authentic in this digital age. On the one hand, the answer is that I can never inform another person on how to be authentic. That’s for each of us to determine…you know, I myself have a hard enough time on deciding what an authentic life is for me and following through with it. I’m not even sure what it means for me to be authentic. So I can’t tell you what it means to be authentic. But the other question is, in the digital age. I mentioned yesterday that I don’t know if it’s more difficult to be authentic today than it was 50 years ago or 500 years ago or 5000 years ago. You know, not all humans in my experience are inclined to worry about that question; not all people are inclined to be philosophers or philosophical-minded. It’s a few people, a minority. But I think, in the digital age, there are a lot of changes. In my lifetime, in ways that I can never imagine if I was in your age, digital technology in the form of things like social media and digital marketing and that had become much more all-consuming than I would have ever expected. I’m able to resist it, I think, because of my age a little bit more, but then I have two daughters who are about your age. I think they struggle with how much their identity is inside of social media, their persona, how they present themselves as who they are, which is probably quite different from how they actually are. They are creating their persona based on how they like to be seen, not on who they are. If they are sitting here, I’m gonna say the same thing because they would say the same thing. When I talked to a lot of students your age, all of them are, probably you can say, addicted to social media. Not all, a lot, or they spend more time online, in YouTube and Instagram. But I think they don’t always like that. It’s like they spend more time doing that when they don’t want to, but they do it anyway. So there are different challenges of being authentic in the digital age than there were in my generation. So, I think that each of you, individually, your generation, have to work out on that. I think, going back to read ancient wisdom in the history of philosophy, there is some wisdom in the history of philosophy. So, we’re almost back to the first question, that being well-read in the history of philosophy and understanding how people have approached these deep questions and how deep thinkers have thought about these issues, maybe you can pick an idea here and there that helps you resolve these questions. So, you know, these traditions in India, in China, and the West are thousands of years old, and you have to figure that some good ideas are in there somewhere. But it is a tough job to find those. So good luck, you know. So, I think, in the digital age, there are different challenges to pursuing existential authenticity. I think that, on the one hand, it’s always a challenge, and on the other hand, I think, the digital age is much more incomplacent than anything I’ve seen in my life. I’m sixty-six, and I’ve spent almost exactly half of my life before digital and exactly half of my life in the digital world. So, in my experience, now that I’m older and thinking about all of these, it was better before the digital age. I lived the same life, I travelled international. I did my degrees, I wrote my publications, I met and interacted with people, I went to parties, I did everything that you do on social media or other kinds of digital engagements, and I didn’t need it. So my life hasn’t been improved by digital stuff, my life has been complicated by digital stuff. But there is no way to avoid it now. Even today, with misunderstandings about who’s gonna be here and when, so that happened before digital time too. But, you know, you sent me an email, but you didn’t get copied, and someone else also sent an email. So, that’s not a complaint, it’s a normal thing. It’s a problem in communication. Did you all study any communication theory?
AN,AL: No.
GE: So, in communication theory, there is an idea, and now I have to encode it. For example, my idea is “meet at six o’clock” but then I accidently say “meet at five o'clock”. I made a mistake as I encoded. Then I sent you an email, but you didn’t check it as you were busy, and then you hear from him that I said four o’ clock, and that’s called noise in communication. Then it gets decoded, and you show up to meet me at three o'clock over there when it should be six o'clock over there, right? It’s like the telephone game where kids play in a whisper. I whisper, whisper, whisper, and by the time it comes here, it's a completely different message. So, the point is that, for the telephone game, the digital world hasn’t improved much, in my opinion. You don’t know a world that’s not digital, you don’t know it. You can’t imagine, one time, you won’t believe this, I was in Thailand and I was in a small town. My friend was coming from the US to meet me before email. He said, How are we gonna meet? I said, I don’t know. I was in Thailand and he flew from the US to that village. We didn’t have a time, a place, anything, and we met. So, the question is back to what it means to be authentic and the requirement. I think, being mindful, how you create your persona, who you really are, how the media can start to cause you to distort yourself. I guess it’s back to that, like being mindful of what you're doing and then being in a pursuit of authenticities on your own. That’s up to you.
AL: Sir, what are the career options that are available to students after pursuing philosophy for their higher studies?
GE: That’s an interesting question. You’re gonna hear all the time that philosophy is a useless degree, has no practical application, that's what they told me. On the one hand that's true. So then we get back to philosophy for its own sake. Maybe it's the wrong way to look at it, you don't do philosophy for something else but that doesn't help because you need a job, right? Yeah. Unless you want to be a philosophy professor, that kind of thinking is not very helpful. So the good news is that, for all of the liberal arts degrees like English, History, Social Science, philosophy students do much better doing non-philosophy stuff than other discipline stuff, demonstrated by higher income and I think the reason for that is the ability for critical thinking. More practically, now that we are in the age of generative AI, who knows what this could mean. I don’t know. You've probably heard of the phrase “prompt engineering”, do you know that?
AN,AL: No
GE: Did you use Gemini? I think ChatGPT is better.
AN,AL: Yes.
GE: Okay so prompt engineering is the skill of asking the right questions. You can study prompt engineering, you can get a degree in it, but it's not really engineering. I don't like this phrase "prompt engineering sounds like engineering", there is something to that but it's not the technical stuff, it's understanding how generative AI thinks, which you can do. Understanding how to ask the correct questions to get the answers you are looking for and that's what critical thinking is. So in some ways “prompt engineering” is unnecessary jargon for asking questions correctly and there's a whole career field in this. It’s not being an undergraduate, writing a paper on it, and becoming a professor. In every field, including medicine and business, there are specific AI apps. Now I can see philosophy majors being the best at working in like prompt engineering fields. So it would be a good idea to explore prompt engineering while majoring in philosophy. And this is what's always been the case, at least in the US, many see studying philosophy as a stepping stone to other career fields which include law, clergy etc., but it's also good for writing skills because Chat GPT writes better than I do, but I'm a good writer. This is something that always amazes me. So that gives me a dilemma, why should I give you second best writing when I can give you better writings from Chat GPT. But businesses don't worry about these ethical issues, business wants results, law wants results. Do you want the second best brain surgeon, or do you want the one who uses ChatGPT or AI to do the brain surgery the best? Okay, it's easy to answer, right? So I think there's career options outside of the normal ones of law, clergy and maybe some writing things. So this is very early, uh, to think about this, but it might be something you might want to explore for example. So yeah, and there's a lot of certificates, of course, everything's free online you can even study anything you want about you, anything or some other people. So in the sense that you probably really want a job. Then, the other thing, though, is again looking, you know, undergraduate philosophy might be a stepping stone. But you know, I would never say, try to be a professor because the jobs are not existing as for a thousand PhDs in philosophy. There might be only one job. So somebody gets the job but 999 people don't so whether you want to gamble, that is up to you. But I don't know the education system in India as well as I do in the US. In the US, it's quite easy to study an undergraduate degree in this and then get the master's degree in that. So I don't know how that works here.
So you know, for let's say, it's very practical degrees like philosophy is good for MBA or really looking for anything because again, for you, the thing I heard most because you know I stepped outside of philosophy and did business stuff and the thing I always heard so many times is that I approach things differently, and sometimes that's better, not always. Sometimes I don't fit in, but sometimes to have the outside perspective is what's valuable. So I think you just have to, like, the trick is to figure out what skills you've gotten from studying philosophy, maybe not so much you know, Plato or epistemology or something. Quite honestly, I think Chat GPT helps with that. Try to think of what skills you've learned from studying philosophy and then build on that in terms of career.
AN: So ,it's like it helps you to build skills which you can use for many other fields.
GE: Yeah, transferable skills. So I think that the trick though, is to articulate, be very clear, maybe on your resume or something to be able to articulate what those skills are- communications skills, critical thinking skills, writing skills, and on and on.
AN: I think that is one of the reasons why many professionals from other fields as well, come to study philosophy. We also have a lot of students here who were formerly in a different field, but then they felt the need to learn philosophy. So they came.
GE: But are they coming to use it because they're interested in asking those questions?
AN: Yes. They understood that whichever field they are in, they need to have that ability to ask the right questions.
GE: So this is interesting. And this is like something that it's an issue that you can't solve, but maybe it's an issue you can be aware of. You know the myth, or probably the reality, is that Indians are quite good in tech stuff, quite good in computer stuff and quite good in math stuff. I think it's true, yes?
AN,AL: Yes.
GE: So with generative AI coming, a lot of those tasks are going to be taken over. So what I see is businesses, they're not just with Indians, Chinese, Americans, Germans, everybody, because, for so long, about 20 years, all universities have been pushing towards STEM(Science Technology Engineering Maths). Because that was the way to get a job. But what you hear is businesses want people that are creative, people who can speak clearly, people who can reason, people who can write well, which is philosophy right? But then, again, I'm saying this is a problem you can't solve. So businesses say we need people like that. Philosophy is making people like that. But businesses never think of hiring people from philosophy, despite needing exactly those types of people. And I didn't even meet people, business people say, “I can hire, you know, if I can find somebody that has thinking, writing, speaking skills, I can train them with technology”, but still they don't think about hiring philosophers. So this is a big issue that I can't solve, none of us can solve. I think the trick is, you know, is the other advice. This isn't why… okay I'll give you some advice. So you might see jobs advertised that you're interested in and they want a degree in business or chemistry or something and you think “why, I don't meet the requirements”. Apply it anyway and list the skills you have, let them say no. You don’t say, I'm not qualified. Let them tell you that you're not qualified. What can they do, delete or throw out as trash? Okay. No penalty to you except a few minutes of your time. A lot of times too when you see the jobs listed, that maybe you're not qualified for? You'll see kind of the skills they're looking for and probably you have those skills as philosophy majors, so let them say that.
AL: Sir, what made you choose “Heidegger’s Typewriter” as the topic for tomorrow’s seminar?
GE: Because it is so fun. It's a very goofy topic. It's just a fun topic. But it has some deep implications, for some other things we're talking about today, it has to do with authenticity, it has to do with the technology which also includes typewriters. Have you ever used a typewriter? Anybody?
AL,AN: No
GE: Oh! It’s so much fun. The sound, the smell, but even for Heidegger, that's too much. So it's a fun topic. But it also has some implications for authenticity, for how we relate to technology, which you just have to take one more step to go from typewriter to word processing, and then one step more from where it has it into social media. So, it looks like a cool technology. Typewriters are cool. I did my PhD over 500 papers on a typewriter and may not make a mistake. So if I type all the lines and I make a mistake at the last part, I start again. Very painful. Well, also a disappointment, right?
AL,AN: Yeah!
GE: So mindfulness. But I prefer my Word Processor. (Everyone laughs).
AL: Is there anything particular that drew your attention towards Heidegger’s works?
GE: So that's an interesting question. So… you know, because I studied and have two master degrees of philosophy. And so you know, I read a whole history of philosophy like West, East, American, European uh… so I have several reasons I think why I gravitated towards Heidegger. I had a professor who I loved a lot. But he just did phenomenology. And he didn't even like Heidegger that much. He liked Husserl. Have you ever studied Husserl?
AL: Edmund Husserl?
GE: Yeah. Did you study about him?
AL: I had read somewhere about him.
GE: He is quite different from Heidegger. But Heidegger was his student. So the professor we studied phenomenology and then a part of that class for one week or something was Heidegger. And for me, that was the one, that kind of like, lit up. The one that I found the most interesting and most, we can say, called to me. So I found it very engaging, and it even prompted me to learn German. So I actually did my dissertation work in German and went to Germany and studied to write my dissertation on Heidegger, in Germany. I had a scholarship. And you can't really do German philosophy unless you have some understanding of the German language. I think that is the case for anything. You can't do Shankara without some understanding of Sanskrit and so on and so on. So I got very interested in the German language mixed with Heidegger. It's almost the same thing. Hard to separate. But again you know, his ideas...so this is very strange, you know, many people say Heidegger is very difficult or... he's very funny though. I don't know if you've read much Heidegger. Many people say it's a bunch of bullshit, it's a bunch of nonsense. "What is this? It's junk." Other people have different opinions, I have a different opinion. I don't think so. I found him deep and profound and I like the questions he asks. You know, philosophy again, I think the questions are often the important thing. So, why did I go to Heidegger? I don't know that I know exactly the “why”, but, he was most attractive. But I also love Plato and the whole German tradition. It’s like, it kind of came out of Heidegger's thoughts. It's called Theory of Interpretation, Hermeneutics... But there is another interesting thing and maybe this is a factor and maybe it's not. I'm German blood. So my name is not German. Emery, that's an Irish name. But when my grandfather's father died, he was adopted by an Irish guy. So my blood name is Altendorf, which is very German, I guess. So my blood, you wanna say that, is hundred percent German. So maybe my brain is hardwired that way. Even my grandparents in the US didn't speak English until they went to school. So I think my mind is even before philosophy and yes, just because of grandparents and parents, we must have some lucky German mind somehow a little bit. Something like that, maybe, yeah.
AL: Thank you for sharing your valuable time with us sir. This was a very informative session and we learnt a lot from what you have shared with us today.
AN: Yes. Thank you sir.
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