When you picture a philosopher, you might imagine a disengaged thinker floating off into the clouds. If that's your image, then you aren't looking at Professor of Philosophy Stanley Konecky.
"I think of philosophy as an activity aimed at influencing other activities," says Konecky. "Aristotle says in his Ethics that the point of ethics is action, and I agree. The ultimate aim of ethics is not thinking about action; it's acting; it's doing something. I encourage students to make those links."
For Konecky, doing takes place in the classroom, where students are introduced to ideas that shake up their worlds. "I really believe in this craft. I believe deeply that if you get a good liberal arts education, your life will be better. You will see things more clearly and more deeply, and because you do, you may suffer more deeply, but your joys will also be deeper."
It wasn't always clear that philosophy would be at the center of Konecky's life. The 35-year Hartwick veteran was an undergraduate engineering major. Then "literature and the liberal arts changed my life. If I had gone into engineering, even if I made a better 'living' than an academic does, I would not have lived a better life."
The ultimate test of an idea is whether it helps us live, says Konecky: "Life becomes richer not because you can quote Shakespeare or Dostoevsky, but because you can see how difficult it is to be a human being. It's a mess out there. What we can do is give our students equipment to navigate some very deep, nasty waters, whether on the job, in personal relations, politics."
According to Konecky, all of this points to the importance of the liberal arts. On the one hand, he embraces the non-careerist spirit at the heart of the liberal arts tradition: "It troubles me to imagine students going through four years and thinking they are here just to find a profession. One of our jobs is to get them to see how important their lives and the way they live those lives are."
On the other hand, he revels in the breadth of vision available to liberal arts students: "I think it would be a mistake to take only one subject in college. The whole point is to see that political scientists and sociologists look at life differently, physicists and mathematicians look at it more differently, and those in the creative arts even more differently. The point is to have the opportunity to see that there is more than one significant way of looking at things"--grinning broadly and laughing, he adds, "and then, of course, to realize that philosophy is the soundest way."
