Question and See Beyond the Current Paradigm
Assistant Professor of Philosophy Emily Kelahan in East College, which houses the Department of Philosophy. Photo by Dan Loh.
Office Hours: Associate Professor of Philosophy Emily Kelahan
by Tony Moore
Associate Professor of Philosophy Emily Kelahan received her Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her interests lie in the history of early modern philosophy and the philosophy of work, allowing her to engage in a variety of subdisciplines simultaneously. Her most recent publication is the article “What Micromanagement Reveals about Leadership” in Philosophy of Management.
Philosophy might not be the splashiest major, at a time when everyone’s obsessed with self-driving cars, AI and talking movies (OK, not that last one). But Dickinson students fill your classes, wanting to know how to intellectually process the world around them. What about the philosophy department, and your approach to the field of philosophy, helps students make the rest of their world click into sharper focus?
So much of what we experience in our daily lives is difficult to understand and express. We have negative feelings about something that's happening at work. We don’t feel that our parents understand us. We can’t explain to someone who doesn’t share our passion why we think baseball, D&D or performing plays is an excellent way to spend one's time. We are seriously disturbed by what's happening in the world and how others seem to perceive it. Philosophy provides frameworks, concepts and vocabulary that empower us to explain why.
At Dickinson, we challenge students by having them read and consider the way philosophers conceive of human agency, the nature of political power, the essential components of a meaningful life and the very nature of reality itself. Just as important, we challenge them to see that, for example, what Adam Smith had to say about guilt and shame makes sense of why we react to conflict in certain ways or that studying philosophers’ answers to questions like “What is science and why is it authoritative?” gives them a tool kit for talking to people who disagree with them about the efficacy of vaccines or that reading Aristotle can help them explain why they love to play their sport even though, at times, it can make them unhappy.
In “What Micromanagement Reveals About Leadership,” you approach the universally hated practice of micromanagement from the perspective of the people who actually experience it, shining a light on the moral harms, the threats to worker autonomy and what real leadership should look like instead of control disguised as management. What draws you to these questions, and how do they fuel your own intellectual fire?
I grew up in a working-class “rust belt” community where many people worked for one large corporate employer. I saw prosperity wane and, with it, a sense of autonomy and dignity. I also saw technology make things safer but also less expressive of the community the technology was there to serve. Of course, I didn’t have words like autonomy, dignity, and self-expression then. I was extremely fortunate to have the opportunity to go to college and then graduate school. I loved learning about 17th and 18th century philosophy in large part because it enabled me to see that few things about the way we see our world were inevitable, including the ways in which we exist in relation to one another, such as in the workplace.
Many of the features of our workplace relationships are contingent and can, and should, change. We can improve and reform the ways many leaders in organizations relate to the people who carry out work, and philosophy can help us do that. The great news is that in many cases (micromanagement is one example), treating people better is also better for the bottom line and the manager’s well-being.
I love the intellectual challenge of showing people that an education in the liberal arts is not at all at odds with success in other domains. Yes, it sometimes asks us to slow down and really look at something, but in the long run it’s an accelerant. Innovation requires that we question and see beyond the current paradigm. It’s awfully hard to do that without philosophy.
Philosophy keeps showing up where it matters most—from the ethics of AI (there’s that again) and the future of work to the deeper questions of knowledge, belief and meaning that shape our daily professional and personal lives. What makes this discipline so vital and relevant right now, across so many industries, fields and the full spectrum of lived human experience?
It’s a cliché, but what the discipline very broadly construed offers people is some version of what Socrates called the examined life. Socrates’ version was quite radical—constant self-evaluation and relentless pursuit of virtue, meaning and understanding; but we don’t have to adopt the approach this broadly or deeply. We can look at different-sized domains and ask, “What is this? What can I know about it? What should I do?”
These questions have obvious applications to AI—What is it? A mind? An agent? A mirror? What do we understand about it? Might there be things about it that we cannot understand in principle? Supposing it can replace human workers, romantics partners, therapists, etc., should it? But we can apply this framework to just about anything! What is a team? What kind of knowledge can I gain about how to put together a winning team? Are there things I should not do in pursuit of victory? Right now, many people feel out of control in their industries and lives, so I’m not surprised to see books on stoicism in the business bestsellers lists. “What, if anything, is under my control?” is a perennial philosophical question. The stoics offer us a way to cope with the possibility that we can’t control much of anything outside of our own responses to the events of life. Though I don’t identify as a stoic myself, I can see why that’s attractive right now.
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Published July 28, 2026