Who said you can’t philosophize at the farmers market?

On April 23, the Ask a Philosopher table at the Grand Army Plaza Greenmarket gave passersby the opportunity to speak with philosophers and ask any questions they may have had about anything from metaphysics to the existence of God. The booth was the brain child of Ian Olasov, the founder of The Brooklyn Public Philosophers, a lecturing forum hosted by The Brooklyn Public Library.

“I battered around the idea of starting something like this but I didn’t think seriously about it until 2013,” Olasov said.

This year was Ask a Philosopher’s first, but about 50 or 60 curious thinkers of all ages stepped up to the table and asked hard-hitting questions about personal identity, free will, and morality.

Ian Olasov. Photo used with permission

Though BPP have hosted events like Ask a Philosopher and a philosophy for kids day, the forum’s main focus is on its speaker series. “Philosophers come out and lecture about their work for 15 minutes and then there’s a discussion,” he said. “People come by to talk about all different topics.” Color perception, race, and demagogy are just a few of the broad topics that the BPP cover.

Olasov’s first encounter with philosophy was in high school. “I was hooked from the start,” he said. But reading Plato is what gave him the confidence to pursue the subject. “He made me feel like I could participate in the conversation.”

Along with organizing the BPP, the 30-year-old philosopher is currently working on his PhD at the CUNY Graduate Center and is researching what morality does for us and how people talk about it. He is also an adjunct at Brooklyn College. Though the BPP’s season is ending this month, Olasov hopes to host another Ask a Philosopher forum sometime in the summer and aims to set up in other parts of the city, specifically in communities that don’t have much access to the subject or to similar events.

Promoting diversity in philosophy is also on the agenda for the BPP. In a field that is made up of mostly white men, he’s proud to say that the lecture crowds are anything but whitewashed. “It looks a lot more like Brooklyn, rather than a typical philosophy lecture,” Olasov said. “This is the place where the virtues of good philosophy can shed some light on things.”