Now it is a feature of PhDs at my university that the
director of studies is often present as a silent witness to proceedings and
after today’s happy occasion the DoS, my rather excellent colleague Gill
Thomson, commented, in the nicest possible and uncritical way, that she thought
that I had given her student something of a grilling. This might be, she conceded,
in part a feature of her own perception and position: hearing but unable to
respond to questions. But I suspect that it is more likely the action at a
distance of the philosophical habit of thinking that the nicest way to greet a
colleague's birthday festschrift collection is to give them a good kicking and
then publish the result. But it prompts me to ask, what should a philosopher do
in a social science PhD viva. What should be our manifesto?
It may be easier to approach this from the contingency of
PhD work in my School. We like to ground empirical work exploring the
experiences of patients or health-workers in a methodological framework which
owes something to some dead German philosophers. I 'll assume that this is
standard. (My external colleagues today suggested that it wasn’t, in fact, but
I will ignore that detail for the moment.) If so, what should we, fairly
applied philosophers, do in vivas?
Here’s my suggestion though first I want to reserve the
right to do anything appropriate. Like the academic contract which finishes
with the comment: ‘and any other reasonable request of the head of department’
no manifesto should be restrictive of what is best in local particular
circumstances. Phronesis rules. But the paradigm role might be something like
this:
To take the descriptions of the framework within which
empirical findings are presented and explore what is meant by the student by
them.
Part of this approach is that one should not attempt to ‘combat’
an invocation of Heideggerian phenomenology, for example, by bringing to bare
what Wittgenstein might say, had no mention been made of him. (Here is a
contrast with my role in a philosophy PhD viva.) So the idea is to take only things which are there in the text
and invite a clarification of what they mean to the author in the light of
other things written. The manifesto idea is that there is no need to do
anything more than that. Further, one can learn something from the resolute
reading of Wittgenstein in this sense: the role is not to police the limits of
sense by ruling out some things as obviously nonsense or foolish but to offer
an immanent critique in a standing invitation to the candidate to explain what might be meant by them by even non standard combinations of words.
