Staff Media Recommendations: Professor Wagner

I met recently with professor Brian Wagner in CLI and we discussed the big questions in life and truth-seeking. Pondering the big questions sounds pretty intimidating, but it’s not if you’re a scholar of philosophy!

RVC Valley Forge: “Introduce yourself, your field, how long you’ve been teaching, and why you teach what you teach.”

Professor Wagner: “I’m Brian Wagner, I teach Philosophy and Religion at Rock Valley College. I’ve been teaching here for, going on, eleven years now.”

RVC Valley Forge: “Why do you teach the subject you teach?”

Professor Wagner: “Philosophy was not something I expected to be going into at college, but I had a friend who invited me to take logic and I just took it because he said it would be fun, but I loved it! I didn’t think, at the time, I was going to change my major over it, but I just loved the class. So, the next year, I went and I took a history of philosophy class and I loved it. So I was like ‘well I’m at least going to minor in this’. Then I took another class and I fell in love with that. That was, I think, ethics and I was like ‘I gotta keep doing this’. So, I switched my majors, I made philosophy my major and foreign languages my minor. Then I said, ‘I’m just gonna go all out and do philosophy.’ So, I ended up getting three degrees, two of which are philosophy degrees.

So you’re asking the question, ‘why do I like this field?’

Because it asks the big questions, the deep questions of life. I want to know more about those issues, I want to find out what the answers are to the things that we haven’t figured out.”

RVC Valley Forge: “Did you have a second field you were interested in teaching?”

Professor Wagner: “Well, I don’t know if you consider religion to be different from philosophy, but if it is then I guess I would teach religion as a second thing since that’s already what I do. No, I don’t think there would be anything else I would be teaching.”

RVC Valley Forge: “So the main question is, what is at least one, piece of media you recommend to RVC students and why?”

Professor Wagner: “This is a hard question because there’s so many things that I want to recommend. I did narrow it down to one book, I think inevitably it’s gonna be a book for me because I love books. There’s a book by M. Scott Peck called The Road Less Traveled and that book, I’d recommend every student read at least once in their life.”

RVC Valley Forge: “How has this piece of media impacted you personally?”

Professor Wagner: “It changed my life because it, again, gets me thinking about the deeper questions and the first chapter talks about these disciplines that you do to improve your life. The second chapter is trying to redefine what love is and that definition, I think, is what changed me.

I thought about the concept of love differently. It caused me to realize that it’s not just about a feeling or an emotion, but an intellectual decision to try to help other people and that is I think what changed my life. I realized that it’s not just about me and it got me thinking about some of the big questions.

‘Why am I here?’ and ‘what’s our role in this?’ ‘how do we get along with each other?’ and all those big questions that are important.”

RVC Valley Forge: “Do you have a favorite quote from this media?”

Professor Wagner: “I do actually, this is the opening line from The Road Less Traveled: ‘Life is difficult. This is a great truth, it’s one of the greatest truths. It is a great truth because once we truly see this truth, we transcend it. Once we truly know that life is difficult-once we truly understand and accept it-then life is no longer difficult. Because once it is accepted, the fact that life is difficult no longer matters.’

I like that one, that’s how the book opens.”

RVC Valley Forge: “Do you have any parting words?”

Professor Wagner: “Keep seeking truth.”

Talking with professor Wagner left me with some good advice. It’s extremely important to challenge the big, scary questions, be a truth-seeker, and take logic in college; it might change your life!