Poetic justice

True to the namesake of the endowed chair he holds, A.C. Reid Professor of Philosophy George Graham incorporates psychology and philosophy in his work.

cademic disciplines, like abnormalities of the mind, aren’t always confined to hard-and-fast categories. Still, it is tempting to describe George Graham as a psychologist as much as a scholar of philosophy, his formal field.

That’s okay with Graham—labels mean little to the first A.C. Reid Professor of Philosophy at Wake Forest. What matters most to him in his work at the cusp of the disciplines are the synapses he can bridge between the brain’s workings and philosophy’s most profound and fundamental questions.

Graham, fifty-seven, assumed the chair in January after twenty-seven years at the University of Alabama-Birmingham. Friends and former students of A.C. Reid—one of the most esteemed teachers in Wake Forest history—established an endowment in the philosophy department in 1965 on the occasion of their beloved mentor’s retirement. In ensuing years it grew to support lectures and seminars, but the professorship it provided for remained unfilled. Only in the past few years has sufficient money accumulated to support the professorship.

At UAB in 1975, Graham was the first faculty hire of the inaugural chair of its fledgling philosophy department—Thomas K. Hearn Jr. Hearn, who soon was appointed dean of arts and humanities and then academic vice president at UAB before moving on to Wake Forest’s presidency, enjoyed a luncheon reunion with his old friend and colleague recently.

Graham had guest lectured at Wake Forest some years ago and was well acquainted with several members of its philosophy faculty, who were impressed with his scholarship and stature. Ralph Kennedy, associate professor and chair, made the appointment.

There is poetic justice in Graham’s selection. The namesake of his chair was a faculty legend who taught philosophy and psychology in a combined department for most of his half-century tenure. Graham’s work has consistently incorporated both fields. At UAB he held a cross appointment in psychology and co-founded its program in cognitive science, which combines neuroscience and inquiry into the nature of knowledge and consciousness.

“A.C. Reid was by all accounts a wonderful and tremendously influential teacher of psychology and philosophy, a fierce opponent of relativism and nihilism in all their guises, and a champion of the classical and Christian virtues,” Kennedy says. “That the same description also fits George well, and gives me confidence that we have found a fitting inaugural occupant of the Reid chair.”

Graham, who calls his specialty “neurophilosophy,” is developing a model of “normal” self-experience or self-consciousness based partly on cases of mental disorder. His publication topics include the psychopathology of self-ascription, schizophrenia, and the nature of delusion. His most recent book is titled “When Self-Consciousness Breaks: Alien Voices and Inserted Thoughts.”

“An underlying assumption of my research is that oftentimes, how something works is best discovered when it doesn’t work,” says Graham, an engaging and articulate fellow who chaired the UAB philosophy department for seventeen years. “We can observe what role the different parts play in a system’s operation when one of them breaks down.

“In a car we comprehend the role a carburetor plays when it doesn’t work,” he observes. “The same is true with the human mind: we can discover facts about how healthy, normal, or well-functioning minds are put together by examining what happens to the human mind when it comes apart. I’m the guy who likes to put a hammer to the carburetor and go back and take a look at the system from the perspective of brokenness.”

How does aberrant mental behavior connect with philosophy, in Graham’s view? By its relevance to philosophy’s perennial issues.

“In philosophy, there are so-called timeless questions that are asked,” he says. “What role does the mind play in directing rational and intelligent behavior? Do human beings have free will, and how does it operate? What does it mean to be a conscious being—what is it like to be a person?

“When mental disorders disrupt our rational and intelligent behavior, our free will, or our consciousness, we can ask, how are we human?”

Graham cites several examples of connections. Alzheimer’s disease, for instance, robs its victims of their autobiographical memory. “What role do these recordings of our lives that each of us have play in our ability to function normally?” he asks. “How does their absence affect or compromise our human freedom?

Some schizophrenics manifest a bizarre symptom called “thought insertion”—the notion that someone else’s thoughts are occurring in their heads. “Part of being a person is to be the self-conscious author of your own behavior,” Graham says. “It seems that in schizophrenia there’s a breakdown of what it’s like to be a person. If someone else’s thoughts appear to be in your head, you are no longer the conscious author of your life.”

In chronic cases of severe melancholia, sufferers’ emotional lives no longer are under their own control. “Unless we can control our negative feelings,” Graham notes, “they too can be interruptive in our ability to live our lives consciously.”

Collaboration and synthesis come naturally to the affable Graham. Among his many institutional service endeavors at UAB, he founded its faculty senate, and already he’s made a couple of collaborative connections at Wake Forest. He and Wayne Silver of biology and James Schirillo of psychology are evaluating possible modifications of the undergraduate neuroscience minor curriculum, and he is collaborating with a half dozen neurobiology researchers and graduate students at the Medical Center in an investigation of neural correlates of consciousness.

“I see George as contributing to a better appreciation on the part of people in these programs of the utility of philosophical reflection, and as helping us philosophers grasp the philosophical significance of the scientific research in which he is interested,” Kennedy says.

Despite his intense research activity, Graham loves to teach. He won numerous undergraduate teaching awards at UAB, and this fall he will teach introductory philosophy and a first-year seminar titled “Mad Minds, Broken Minds.”

“George is a gifted teacher, and he made it clear to us that a large part of why he was interested in coming to Wake Forest was that he saw it as an ideal place to teach, which he thinks of as absolutely central to his vocation as a philosopher,” Kennedy says.

Was it easy leaving UAB after more than a quarter of a century? “No, of course not,” Graham replies. “My family and I have close friends in Birmingham and at the university. But I felt it was time to stretch myself—institutionally, culturally, and philosophically. I had always urged my students to seek new worlds—to stretch—and a teacher must try to practice what he or she preaches. Most importantly, too, of course, I was deeply complimented by being offered the Reid chair and the prospect of serving as its first holder.

“Wake Forest is a lovely place,” he says. “I’m delighted with my students and faculty colleagues and am extremely pleased to be here.”
--David Fyten

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