FACULTY PROFILE
"I have been asked many times over the years which I liked most: teaching or philosophy? Of course I would like to answer that I enjoy teaching philosophy. My interest since high school has been philosophy. Teaching philosophy gives me the opportunity to interact with a group of people, my students, who have philosophical questions themselves. Frequently, in class, I have said that in philosophy there are many suggested answers, but few questions. It is most rewarding to move the arguments in class from possible "meanings of life" to asking ourselves if we would know a "meaning of life" if it came to us via USPS.
After receiving an M.A. in philosophy at Northern Illinois I went for further graduate work at the University of Oregon with John Wisdom. The high point of my academic career there may have been when the department chairperson suggested I take Professor Wisdom to a Eugene Emeralds baseball game. He was a sports fan, but had not been to a live game. John Wisdom had come from Trinity College, Cambridge, and had been a colleague of Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein. I took all four of the courses he offered there. He did like baseball and marveled at the play of the outfielders, who are much more animated than in cricket.
Although I hit three home runs (and a single) in a college game at the University of Denver when I was twenty-two; I won't say much about this here because people invariably say how much better baseballs travel at this altitude. So, I'll pass along to publications. I worked on an annotated bibliography of the philosophy of Edmund Husserl and it was published in 1970 by Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague. Professor Husserl had been one of the major figures in European philosophy, so I was pleased that my bibliography was picked out from among a number of choices. In 2001 I wrote a workbook for a class I would be teaching at China Youth University for Political Science in February of 2002. The workbook was published in 2002 by the Foreign Language Press, Beijing. Since it was twelve years ago, I have stopped looking for royalty checks.
During the years 1995 to 2003 I was active in the APA affiliated organization for Chicago, the Association for the Development of Philosophy Teaching (ADOPT). Our community service project was having informal philosophical debates with and for the public on Friday evenings at the Lincoln Restaurant on the north side of Chicago. I was vice-president for two years and president for two years. It was an interesting mixture of a few people who had quite a bit of formal classes (ex clergy) to many people who had never attended a college class. ADOPT members were no better than the average philosophy faculty members in keeping names of persons who would attend, but attendance was usually ten-to-fifteen with two or three ADOPT members."
- William T. Craig, Ph.D
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