An Interview with Dr. Carolina Sartorio Diotima conducted an interview with Dr Carolina Sartorio, a philosophy professor at Rutgers University. She works on causation, agency, free will, moral responsibility, and other issues at the intersection of metaphysics, the philosophy of action, and moral theory. Diotima: Some students are skeptical of the value of studying philosophy and instead pursue what they consider more practical majors. What do you consider the value of philosophy? Dr. Sartorio: I’d say the main value is that it questions common beliefs and assumptions in ways that other disciplines don’t, and in a way that helps you hone your critical thinking skills. It tends to raise more questions than it answers, but this is a good thing, not a bad thing. When you do philosophy you get to think about really interesting problems in a logical and critical way, problems that other people normally don’t think about. You also learn to think and write more clearly, which is helpful for any professional career.
Diotima: What first got you interested in the problem of free will?
Dr. Sartorio: When I was in graduate school I took some metaphysics classes and some ethics classes that I really liked. Eventually I discovered that there were cool philosophical questions at the intersection of those fields, as with the topic of free will and other issues in the philosophy of agency more generally, where metaphysics and ethics come together. When you think about the problem of free will, you think about the connection between certain rather abstract metaphysical assumptions about people and more practical moral judgments about people, which is something that I find particularly interesting.
Volume VII (2024) 52
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