Faculty Spotlight: Jack Justus

Jack Justus is a professor in the Department of Philosophy, part of Florida State University’s College of Arts and Sciences. After earning his doctoral degree in philosophy from the University of Texas at Austin in 2007, Justus began teaching at FSU the following year. Later, in 2018, Justus was a visiting fellow at the Pittsburgh Center for Philosophy of Science, where he conducted research and began writing his book, “The Philosophy of Ecology: An Introduction,” which was published by Cambridge University Press in 2021. His primary research areas are the philosophy of science, environmental philosophy, and the history of analytical philosophy.

Tell us a little about your background, where you’re from and what brought you to FSU.

I'm from a small town in Illinois, Galesburg, halfway between Chicago and Saint Louis, Missouri and thoroughly within cornfields. I earned two bachelor’s degrees from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, one in math and the other in philosophy. I knew I wanted to move somewhere other than the Midwest, so I pursued master's and doctoral degrees at the University of Texas at Austin starting in 1999. After earning a Ph.D., I was a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Sydney in Australia while also starting an assistant professorship at FSU, splitting time between Sydney and FSU for about three years until I moved to FSU full time in 2010.

What inspired you to pursue a career in philosophy?

I began undergraduate studies in physics, which I discovered for me was far from straightforward. In contrast, I found mathematics much easier, comparatively clearer and more transparent, and I switched majors. Bitten by the bug of deep thoughts, I also kept taking philosophy classes, which I viewed more as a hobby. After realizing I could receive a whole additional degree in philosophy by taking just two more classes, and that it was what I wanted to devote my intellectual life to, I decided to pursue philosophy more seriously. I realized philosophy allows one to explore a wide range of topics with depth, with questions posed from the icy slopes of pure logic to the lush thickets of philosophy of aesthetics, to how people should appreciate art, beauty and taste. It was clear then and now that philosophy was the right choice.

Can you break down your areas of research for us?

The philosophy of science deals with anything and everything that is not straightforwardly resolvable in science by empirical data. There are all kinds of scientific debates caused by conceptual confusion, or involving difficult foundational issues, such as deciding which statistical paradigm to use to show that data supports a hypothesis. Philosophy can help scientists answer such questions and make deep theoretical decisions, thereby contributing to what makes science the unrivaled enterprise within human history for discovering truths.

Environmental philosophy applies philosophy of science to environmental science, especially its attempts to use scientific methods and resources to address pressing problems like pollution and deforestation.

The history of analytical philosophy is the history of recent philosophy as it’s practiced in the majority of philosophical departments in the Western tradition, focusing on logic, clarity and formalization. I’m interested in this history because it yields compelling answers to metaphilosophical questions, which is sometimes referred to as the philosophy of philosophy. Metaphilosophy evaluates the nature and purpose of philosophy, considering questions such as how much philosophical intuition should be trusted or what the ultimate sources of knowledge about the universe are.

What do you want the public to know about the importance of your research?

I want the public to know philosophical research like this exists, that individuals are analyzing these questions at the deepest levels, and that this work is very technically rigorous and logic-based. Some articles in philosophy of science read like pieces one would see in top scientific journals and that they are not published in those journals reflects more about how scientific disciplines are organized rather than the pieces’ methodological sophistication.

Tell us about being a visiting fellow for the Center for Philosophy of Science from 2017-2018.

Being a visiting fellow at the Center for Philosophy of Science in Pittsburgh was an unbelievable experience. The center is dedicated to philosophy of science, and while I was there, I got to participate in academic life alongside weekly meetings with other fellows. These meetings were workshops for us to get and give high-quality feedback on written work. Besides those activities, I completed the groundwork for my book.

Tell us about your book, “The Philosophy of Ecology: An Introduction.”

The book is designed to be a biased introduction to the philosophy of ecology, which is a relatively new and upcoming subdiscipline of the philosophy of biology. I wanted to write a central text for the field and stake out an argumentative position on different issues — such as the role philosophy might play when addressing ecological issues like climate change and biodiversity loss — to hopefully steer the discussion in a certain direction.

What is your best memory so far from working at FSU?

Without a doubt, my best memories have been helping co-author the papers of two promising students — one former undergraduate student, Samantha Wakil, and one former graduate student, Joshua Shepherd. We’d meet two or three times a week and have long discussions about the precise wording of our analysis or different objections or publications we thought might bear on our work — it was great! Both of those pieces were eventually published in top-notch journals – “Mathematical Explanation and the Biological Optimality Fallacy” by Wakil and I was published in Philosophy of Science and “X-Phi and Carnapian Explication” by Shepherd and I was published in Erkenntnis.

Do you have any exciting upcoming projects or goals you’re working towards?

I'm working on a second book called “The Elusive Unification of Biological Theory,” in which I examine why the fields of population ecology and population genetics were never unified. These are two very mathematical domains in biology with definite, widely accepted and recognized theories. Ecology and evolution are clearly and inseparably causally interrelated, so it makes sense for them to be (ultimately) unifiable. Yet, despite ingenious biologists making multiple efforts, population ecology and population genetics were never unified. There’s interesting philosophy just underneath the surface about why.

If your students only learned one thing from you (of course, hopefully they learn much more than that), what would you hope it to be?

I hope my students take away the ability to discern and dissect weak arguments. Being able to identify rhetorical devices, red herrings, weak analogies, and notice if questions are being begged are crucial capabilities in our society.