Episode 339: On Hating and Despising Philosophy

Birthday Substack and Meta-Philosophy

0:00Very Bad Wizards is a podcast with a philosopher, my dad, and psychologist Dave Pizarro, having an informal discussion about issues in science and ethics. Please note that the discussion contains bad words that I'm not allowed to say, and knowing my dad, some very inappropriate jokes. In this business of show, you have to have the heart of an angel and the hide of an elephant. Who are you? Who are you?

0:45I'm a very bad man. I'm a very good man. Good man. Good man.

0:52They think deep thoughts and with no more brains than you have. Pay no attention to that man.

1:02Anybody can have a brain.

1:06You're a very bad man. I'm a very good man. Just a very bad wizard. Welcome to Very Bad Wizards. I'm Tamler Summers from the University of Houston. Dave, it's my birthday. We don't need to get into numbers and data about what birthday it is, but it is my birthday. What'd you get me?

1:31First of all, go shorty.

1:36You don't remember? I already gave you your gift. You don't remember? What was that? I don't know. I'm just trying to make you think that I got you something because I know your mental faculties are dimming. So I figure I could just convince you that I bought you something already. You can gaslight me. I got you a Substack subscription to Kate Mann's newsletter. Oh, nice.

2:00Huge. Well, that's great because people need to reward the labor of women. So, yeah. So in this episode, this is a pure, like, philosophy, in the weeds, kind of meta-philosophy episode. We are, in the second segment, going to talk about Bernard Williams, his article on hating and despising philosophy. By the way, what a great writer he was. Yeah. I almost think it's been a little overplayed what a great writer he is, but I do like his style.

2:36It is, you know, like, it feels very conversational. I do think it gets, not in this, because this was for the London Review of Books, but in some of his books, it can get a little convoluted, his sentences. But I know that's going to be, for the Bernard William heads out there, that's going to be sacrilege. But I, you know, he's one of my favorite philosophers of the 20th century, so I have no real issue. And certainly, like, a top 5% writer. Yeah, we'll talk about that, and then we'll also talk about someone who I think might be a better writer, Lily Hugh.

3:08This is hot off the presses, because it was just published, and I happened to see it online at MIND, you know, one of our premier journals. A review of Christoph Scheringa's A Social History of Analytic Philosophy, which I really enjoyed that review. And it definitely sent me down a rabbit hole, not a rabbit hole, deep enough for me to actually look at the book that she's reviewing, but a lot of other things about that book. So that's what we'll be talking about in the main segment.

The Ethics of Academic Monetization

3:40But first. But first. First, there was just like a, you know, getting to metaphilosophy. This was a little thing in the sociology of philosophy. It created quite the stir in the circles of at least philosophers who are online, including the Daily News, which had a post on this. This is a sub-stack post by a philosopher named Walter Veit, or Veit? I don't know how to pronounce it. Like Heisenberg. Like who? Heisenberg? Walter White? No, Walter White.

4:10But this is Veit. Ah, Veit. I mean, I still think that could have been yes-handed, maybe. I was trying to figure out what I was yes-ing. Is senility setting it on me, or is it setting in? Yes, is the answer for both. So this was an article that he posted on his sub-stack called, Is It Unethical for Academics to Monetize Sub-stack? So a little brief history, a little timeline of what happened was Walter Veit posted this, and the version that he originally posted, by name, used as examples of people to make an argument.

4:48His argument was, no, philosophers should not monetize sub-stack, and he was making an ethical argument that they should not. And he singled out Kate Mann and Philip Goff as philosophers who do a lot of public philosophy and who have a sub-stack that they charge for. They have lots of articles behind a paywall. And he got some pushback. He wrote a follow-up article specifically about Kate Mann. Your colleague. My colleague, whom I really like. And he ended up apologizing, taking down that second one that was about Kate Mann.

5:23It was entitled, How Kate Mann's Feminism Hurts Women on Monetization, Entitlement, and Trickle-Down Feminism. He took that one down, and then he actually scrubbed the first article of mentions of any individual person. And has now an apology, saying that he apologized personally to the two academics who were originally named as examples, and says, my argument doesn't require me to name anybody. I was wrong. I shouldn't have done it. So, the link that we'll have in the show notes is to that version. I have the other two versions saved.

5:54Which is weird. Here's a little bit of even deeper sociology. My phone was completely almost unusable with all the texts from you and Paul to each other about this salacious scandal. That's right. You should have muted the group text. So, to all the people I didn't get back to during this period, I apologize.

6:17Yeah. And I didn't really look into it, except there was a great line. I have long pondered whether I should write this post, since criticizing other academics isn't looked upon too kindly. But the institution of academia ultimately matters more than any individuals. This was from the one where it had before he – but it's also still there, even though he's not criticizing, I guess, any individuals in particular now. Right. But that is such a ridiculous claim to make.

6:50Yeah. He says to not call out right afterwards, to not call out unethical behavior in academic colleagues is going to lead to nothing but a loss of trust in the institution that we all depend on. I mean, the absurdity of that, like you can't overemphasize it. Like the institution of academia may not survive that Philip Goff and Kate Mann like monetized their sub stacks. I mean, it's just cloud cuckoo land right there. Yeah. So I couldn't get behind this argument at all. And like – so he says specifically, he's come to the conclusion that many academics are using Substack in an unethical way or at least in a manner that violates the values they profess to hold.

7:27So he's calling them out for hypocrisy, for like endorsing some values such as like sharing of ideas. Because they're public philosophers. They want to share their ideas with the public. Yes. That's right. So he says – he has a couple of arguments in this. One, he says that he thinks that it's unethical to say in your request for money that you need it, that it's necessary or supportive or it will allow them to or are helpful in order to write public philosophy despite being in a secure tenured position.

8:02And then he says he thinks that paywalling alone, even if you're not whatever in a secure position, that it's still bad to keep your valuable philosophy, the philosophy that could change the lives. Because this was really directly connected to the second segment, philosophy that could change lives, keeping that behind a paywall is unethical. Yeah, and of course, like the immediate response to that, you know, that point or that claim is, well, like we write books that people charge money for.

8:33You know, we write for journals that are paywalled and, you know, they cost way more than any $5 a month on Substack. But his point is, those are not meant for the public, or at least on the daily news that I skimmed thing. He says those aren't made for the public. This is supposed to be for the public. And so now to make those paywall, you know, that's beyond the payout. Yeah. But like he never really tackled that first point that we write books or some academics write books and charge money for them and make money in that way.

9:06And I saw even in like the comments, like I never saw him directly engage that because there's nothing about Substack specifically that is new. Like, I mean, this is not a novel thing. Like academics making money off of their work that's on top of their income at the university is not a new thing at all. People give talks, you know, some make a lot of money giving talks to corporate audiences or whatever. Well, that is unethical. I mean, until somebody asks you. So he never tackles that. And then he says, no, this is how this can become ethical.

9:40I think you donate all of your subscription income to charity and that will become ethical, which, again, doesn't follow. Weird. Well, I think you're missing a step and that involves like the internal like dynamics of Substack itself, which is they don't promote like Substacks that aren't paid, like that aren't they don't have a lot of paid subscribers. So they front the ones where there are a lot of paid subscribers because they're a business and it doesn't really help them to have a bunch of people writing for free on their platform.

10:11So so he says, OK, given that given that more people will see it, if you charge money and people are willing to pay for it, then and this it's just such a bizarre thing. Then that's OK, as long as you give all that to charity, which he then says, you know, in a very singer like way, I will do. And so he does that and he gives it to causes shrimp welfare. Well, but also farm. Yeah. Fifty percent to shrimp welfare and fifty percent to farm kind.

10:42You have a lot of contempt for like caring about shrimp, but I don't. Yeah. Well, I'm a vegetarian, so I de facto am doing more for shrimp than you. But I don't care about shrimp of all the animals to support as a weird one. I guess we could like be charitable and try to like come up with like, I don't know, the best presentation of this argument if we've if we're in the mood to be charitable. Sure. And like steel man. Steel.

11:12Yeah. We're going to steel man this. OK, but really quickly, can I just respond to that separate link? Like that link that you said I was missing still doesn't if the argument is that keeping your philosophy behind a paywall because the public deserves it because you're doing public philosophy and you shouldn't get paid. Like it's still paywalled if you donate your money to charity. Like it just doesn't do much for what sounded like a pretty strong argument that people deserve your philosophy to be free. I think it does because people won't even know about your public philosophy unless you have paid subscribers is his point.

11:45That's just the internal dynamics of Substack and the platform. Yeah. But if your argument is that it just shouldn't be paywalled, giving that paywall money to charity is not. No. But so if you look at the Substack charts, it's all people who are have paid subscribers. And like you sometimes find out about Substacks through their algorithms of you might be interested in this, you might be interested in that. And they always give you ones with a lot of paid subscribers. So if you didn't paywall anything, the platform would never promote your blog.

12:18And so it wouldn't be very public. It would just be you writing on that, that someone who like had a friend or someone who liked it. Yeah. No, I mean, I get that. I get that. The one big way that your Substack might get traffic is from making those lists. But that's certainly not the only way. And it still does not unpaywall your articles. Like then don't argue that it's unethical to have them behind a paywall because if all you're doing is saying, well, it's still unethical, but like this is slightly better than OK, I guess.

12:49But then you're not arguing that it's unethical to have a paywall at all. You're not arguing that it's the absolute value, that it's the value that trumps all other values. Yeah, that's true. But I mean, I think his point is in an ideal world, Substack would just promote the free ones just as much as they would promote the paid ones. And then your point would hold. But given that we're in this world, there has to be some kind of moral compromise. The lesser of two evils, like get my philosophy out there. And given that the real, like I take it his biggest point here is the reputation of academia being somehow sullied by, which is I think is completely crazy.

13:32Which is only true if you think that it's a reputation sullying behavior. Yeah, and certainly not based on any like evidence. It's like I don't think there's literally a single other person who has said these fucking academics and then they have the nerve to charge on Substack. So now I think all academia is bullshit. But given that that's the argument, and if that were true, then it might mitigate the blow to academia's reputation if people knew that you were giving all the money to charity and that you only are doing this at all because of Substack's kind of ruthless capitalism.

14:08Right. So, you know, one of the things that annoyed me about his approach was that Kate Mann, I think, makes it very clear that if you can't afford a subscription, just email her and she'll give you a free one. Yeah, which we don't do. Which we don't even do. Like Sam Harris does that. And I thought. But we're not genocidal, you know.

14:26Email tabler. So I thought it was kind of in bad faith to ignore that in the original article. And then later on, you know, the one that he took down, he was like, well, it's not that clear because, you know, and he put like a screenshot of where you had to look to see that message. It was a very weird behavior. But sticking to the argument, what I wanted to know was, so we're both tenured professors, full professors. We have good jobs. Did you feel at all like this was shots at us? Not personally, but. Well, no.

14:56First of all, because it's a podcast, not a. It's different, right? Yeah, completely different. I mean, there's not even like, I can't believe you brought that up. Well, number one, unlike, I think, Kate and some philosophers, our main episodes are free, you know, and it's more the bonus stuff, which I don't think is public philosophy and psychology. It's often public, like talking about a movie or a show we love. Or recently, The Odyssey, which might be thought of as more academic, but because we're such, you know, we exude moral purity, we're now making that free for everybody.

15:31Exactly. And, yeah, our main episodes being free, I don't think anybody should be denied of the dick jokes that we've made over the years. Yeah, exactly. It would harm the reputation of academia. Hey, by the way, it's almost, maybe by the time this gets posted, it will be our 14th anniversary as a podcast. Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean, but sometimes, there are certain points about, like, you make this money. We do have good jobs. We have very steady jobs. And then on top of that, you're making this money. But I think the thing that he leaves out, which would apply to us, too, is just how much work it is.

16:04And, like, that's not work that's particularly rewarded by our universities. That's right. They're very nice to let us do it and not, you know, make a fuss about it. But... I had that thought, too. If you're publishing on Substack, sort of counted on your Vita, I might feel a little different about it. I don't know that I would, but it certainly would seem like you're killing two birds. But also, like, good for you. Yeah, good for you. I know. That's the whole thing that I just don't understand. It's like, you know what? Don't pay, then. I don't know.

16:35Like, what people do in their own time. You know, if you're getting into the weeds at, like, what percentage of your time? Are you doing this on university time or on your own time? Then it's like, mind your business. You know? Yeah. Then it's like, are you in a band? Are you, like, rehearsing on university's time or not? Yeah, I don't think that would work. But, you know, also, writing is fucking hard. Like, there's a reason I don't have a Substack. Yeah. Because I don't want to write, like, two long blog posts every week. Like, I mean, on top of this, it would be impossible.

17:07But, like, you know, like, it's really hard to do. And if you weren't going to get paid any money, I assume this is true for Kate and Philip Goff, they just wouldn't do it. They would just do their normal work. So the reason that it's there is to gain you that extra money. And it's not like we get paid, like, a million dollars a year. Like, we don't get anything close to, like, what probably a lot of the people we know get in their jobs. And so you've got to fucking hustle. Get out there slinging dope. Also, just like, I feel like, man, I know that he's a philosopher and that this is a criticism of philosophers,

17:42professional philosophers. And maybe there's some belief in the purity of what philosophers are doing that's driving this. Or maybe it's just because it's, like, his own backyard. But for fuck's sake, like, I'm friends with a ton of people who work at business schools who make so much money doing external consulting and giving talks and selling their books, that coming after, like, even the top five philosophers in terms of income from something like subsec or even selling books, like, they could never touch. It's like a drop in the bucket.

18:13So if the argument is about academia in general, well, then it's like that battle has been lost. And I also think that, like, the actual opposite is true in that, like, if people are willing to pay for philosophers' thoughts, that says something good about what philosophy is doing, you know? Yeah, because you're a capitalist. The only things that have value are things that pay for. Yeah, by definition, yeah. No, but I actually, like, I agree with you, joking aside about that. Like, I think people like Philip Goff and Kate Mann have actually, if they've affected the reputation of academia at all

18:52or even of just philosophy at all, it's been in a good way. Yeah, I think so, too. Their success has been good for academic philosophy because, as we'll see in the next segment, people don't think very highly of us, you know? And they didn't before, you know, in 1996 or whatever, before substex. Yeah, I think, in general, the venues that have been created with the internet, things like Substack and even YouTube and podcasting that have made it possible for people to share their thoughts,

19:23academic and non-academic, has been great. Like, there are people I would support just because I love what they're doing. It's like, I don't care how much money they make. And it's none of my business what they do with the money that I give them, you know? Yeah, and that's what I think that it's good that Walter Veidt backtracked and said that he shouldn't have talked about specific people because he was doing things like trying to calculate income. That part is very unseemly, so I'm glad he took it down. I'm glad he apologized. What he should also apologize for is this paragraph, which is still on there.

19:54If even Ivy League professors feel the need to monetize their writing by placing it behind paywalls, our whole profession starts to look a bit hypocritical. Do we say what we do because it's true or could financial interests be at play? Actual intentions barely matter because they can hardly be proven. What matters is that such behavior can harm the collective reputation of academia as a whole.

20:27That's just madness, dude. The vibe that I got that it was like the amount of money you were making was what made it unethical. And then I was like, okay, what if I'm a philosopher who is like just a capitalist, you know, like a libertarian capitalist philosopher? And so this is not contra my views. Then does it cease to be wrong? That's the counterintuitive result of this argument. It's only the libertarians who only give a shit about money. They're the only ones that can ethically charge for their podcast, for not their podcast, because none of this applies to podcasts.

21:01I mean, the idea that we're like, is Philip Goff defending panpsychism because he thinks it's true? Or is it because he thinks that's going to be financially like a boon for him? Like nobody thinks this stuff. Like you could argue that about like getting tenure, you know, maybe you're making extravagant claims to get citations. The whole profession is like this, you know, like so many people are like, well, I'll take this crazy view because it's that space is open. And it's the same thing.

21:31Actually, it's a good point. Like that's the real thing. Yeah. The incentive structure has been fucked for a while. So the other daily news scandal was that article that was written in philosophy and public affairs.

AI in Academia and Classrooms

21:43Oh, by AI? Yeah. By an AI or in collaboration with an AI. Like if you want to talk about harming the reputation of academia and that, I'm open to listening for it. Did you look at that article at all? I didn't. It looked like just a terrible article. Yeah, I can't. I'm glad they were honest that AI wrote it, but people are losing their goddamn mind. They really are. It's crazy. I feel like I'm fucking going crazy. And that the idea that people like, we're just going to get more truth, you know, like if we do this, you know, like we're not optimizing our truth like enough by like not using AI.

22:20Our truth discovery. Someone said on the philosophy group chat I'm on, we're not truth maxing unless we use AI, which I attribute to my colleague, Justin Coates. Very funny. Truth maxing is awesome. So, yeah, we can talk about that on a different opening segment. We just can't talk about AI anymore. Yeah. We need like a two-month moratorium. AI is like a succubus, dude. It's draining my mental faculties. And it's just fucking crazy. Like nobody assigns out-of-class papers anymore in human situation.

22:54Like, you know, we have like almost a thousand students that use and the course used to be designed around them writing papers. And now like very few people assign any out-of-class writing. I mean, that's such a big change to just like, it's crazy. It's huge. It's huge. I was recently at a retreat for our department. Me too. Those are great, aren't they? Yeah, it's just like a day-long faculty meeting. But at some point it came, like the discussion of this came up.

23:24And what's crazy is all the communication that we get, not all, but like surprising amount of the communication we get from the administration, from the institution is how to lean in to the use of AI in your classroom. And it's like, none of us wanted that. We don't want to go to a workshop about how to integrate AI. We want to like create like rooms where Wi-Fi doesn't work so that we can have people do real writing, you know? Exactly. That's exactly what we need. But people aren't doing that because you know why? AI is not going to take your job, David.

23:56Someone who knows how to use AI will take your job. From my cold, dead, tenured hands. Yeah, exactly.

24:06Soon we're going to just, like, they'll be like, okay, and then we're going to be hustling on Substack just to pay like our mortgage. Fuck the shrimp.

24:17All right. Well, as, just to highlight the important points, it's completely okay to have a Patreon for your podcast. And it's super erogatory to not have ads on your podcast. I wonder what Walter Veidt would say about, like, what if Cate Mann could have ads? Oh, yeah. I mean, I feel like RX bars and mattresses and stuff would clearly change the philosophy. Kratom. Kratom. It would just be like, all of a sudden she'd start making ethical arguments about sleep and protein intake.

24:52The thing that shows our purity is that we're still promoting Kratom, even after, like, the two or three ads or whatever that we did for it. We actually believe that. There is no questioning our intentions. Yeah. I don't know. It's not universalizable, but it's damn good. Yeah, exactly. I remember back when this was a thing on the Very Bad Wizards subreddit, someone was saying, like, you know, how bad it was that we were doing that. And someone in the comments responded, they have made very clear for, like, a decade that they're a pro-drug podcast.

25:30Exactly. All right. We'll be right back to talk about negative attitudes towards philosophy and especially analytic philosophy. We'll be right back.

26:12We'll be right back.

Show Support and Patreon Tiers

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29:30So yeah, thank you to everybody. We really appreciate all of your support. Like we said, we're so grateful, and we don't think we'd be doing this without you. So thank you very much, and now back to the podcast. All right, let's get to our main topic.

The Insufferable Analytic Philosopher

29:47I think we'll focus probably most on the Bernard Williams essay on hating and despising philosophy, which was from the London Review of Books, published in 1996. But I want to just lead off, just as kind of an amuse-bouche, the opening paragraph to Lily Hughes' review of Christoph Scheringa's A Social History of Analytic Philosophy, How Politics Has Shaped an Apolitical Philosophy, which came out in 2025.

30:24This review is published in mind, literally a couple of days ago. Look at you being on top of it all. Yeah. So here's the opening paragraph. Frankly speaking, the analytic philosopher can be a bit of an insufferable asshole. Into every conversation on any conceivable topic, he enters with confident swagger, poised to pounce at the slightest infelicity or error on the part of his unlucky interlocutors. For any slippage or equivocation, an expression of exasperated confusion and demand for clarification at the ready.

30:58To any proposal, the impulse to counterproposal. Talking with an analytic philosopher when has the distinct feeling of being monitored. Every word, a potential landmine. Every idea inspected for implication and inconsistency. And as if all that weren't bad enough, behind all the smug self-satisfaction some might feel is really nothing at all. The analytic philosopher is intellectually shallow and incurious about anything beyond his narrow province. The products of his thought are accordingly bland, a shameful shadow of what philosophy once was.

31:32To make matters even worse, none of this he finds at all disturbing. On the contrary, the analytic philosopher takes a perverse pride in his ignorance, his simple-mindedness, his utter frivolity and irrelevance. So, it's funny because this isn't, uh, this is just her, I think, uh, Lily. Like, she hasn't gotten to the book yet, although it's very much in the spirit of the book. But this is going to be one of the criticisms of philosophy that Williams considers, which is that it once was, like, in the days of Plato and Hume and even Descartes, Rousseau.

32:11And, like, this used to be something that was worth caring about. And now it has become completely worthless and populated by just some of the most insufferable people to ever live. Um, well, let me ask you first before I get into, like, what I think. Like, does this strike you as an accurate description of the analytic philosopher, as you know? I have to watch my words being married to one. What do you mean by married?

32:42What do you mean by bachelor? Um, the parts, like, right up until there might be nothing behind it at all. So, like, for any slippage or equivocation, an expression of exasperated confusion to any proposal, the impulse to counterproposal, talking with the analytic philosopher that has a distinct feeling of being monitored, everywhere at a potential landmine, every idea inspected for implication and inconsistency, all of that is the most spot-on description that you could give of having to talk to an analytic philosopher. Like, I don't care if my wife or, like, I'm hanging out with Sean and Rachna, like, or Shoemaker, like, they can be high and drunk and you say something like, uh, I think that polyamory is immoral.

33:25Well, like, define, define polyamory. And, like, you can't just say immoral. Or whatever. It's, like, constant. You can't even say just, like, I, I think, like, whatever is good. Like, they'll, they'll just, like, start pushing you in this way that's so second nature to them that, like, they don't realize that sometimes you just want to talk. You just want to actually say some shit, you know? Like, I don't need to talk about, you know, what constitutes a Formula One car to say that, like, I, you know, I find it boring. It's crazy. It's crazy.

33:56Now, the second part where the claim sounds like it's saying, well, but that's hiding their incuriosity and their narrowness. That's, I've, I've found that to be not true in the wonderful quality thinkers that I know, including you, who are an analytic philosopher. Yeah, it's funny because I think I, I have the exact opposite view. Like, I see what you're saying. They're never off the clock. They never punch out. But, but I feel like that was more true, like, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, or maybe it's true of Sean Nichols because it's, like, Rutgers.

34:32I, I associate this with, like, Rutgers and, like, any British philosopher. But, like, overall, I don't find analytic philosophers to be assholes like this down the line. But, like, part of this is, you know, like, probably the ones that I hang out with, and I'm a little probably out of the loop in some of the more elite spaces that you travel in. And certainly I think people can be assholes, and I hate those people, like, as much as, like, the contempt that she has for them, I feel just as much.

35:06I just don't think it's, like, everybody, and I don't think it's all the time, even in talks. Like, I feel like people can be kind of supportive sometimes in a talk. Yeah, yeah. I didn't mean to say that those people are being assholes, though. Like, just for the record. Right. But that kind of combative, like, monitoring, nitpicking. Some more than others. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know who's really like that? Rachana is really like that. So, it's an individual difference. But, like, I think that it's effortful for all of them to turn it off when I hang out with them.

35:37Like, it's crazy. Yeah, maybe people also don't do it around me that much. Because, like, even all those people, like, we had dinner, like, with all of them a few weeks ago. I don't remember that happening at all. I think this is a little fish and water problem with you. Oh, maybe. Yeah. I mean, that could be also. Because there are times where, with almost anybody, like, I'll be like, okay, we're not doing that right now. Let's just hang out and have a couple beers. But the second part I actually think is a little bit more on point, which is that they take perverse pride in the narrowness of their views and the kind of irrelevance of what they're discussing.

36:15And certainly there's smug self-satisfaction and just not enough contact with things outside, you know, like, the fields that they deal with even within philosophy, never mind, like, art and things like that outside of it. You know, like, part of that is just the professionalization, which we'll talk about when we get to Williams' article. But part of it is that this is something that 20th century philosophy built into people, which is funny because, like, it's not like Bertrand Russell wasn't familiar with art, like, or wasn't interested in politics.

36:49He very much was. But there's something about the way that they discussed and the way that that tradition got passed on is the debates themselves were quite insulated and it became something that for people outside those debates, they would have no idea, like, how to even know what was being discussed or what was being questioned or what was at stake or anything like that. And, like, you know, maybe turning to Williams, I want to come back to her review once she gets into the actual book.

37:22But, like, even though I kind of think that philosophers have become a little nicer and less, you know, like this, you know, Rutgers philosophers aside, I do kind of agree with the spirit of all of this paragraph. Like, when you're frustrated with analytic philosophy, I feel like this gets at, like, exactly what the frustration is. Yeah, maybe. But I wanted to lead off with that. Yeah. I just think that the simple-mindedness and pride in ignorance, that's, I just don't see that.

37:53Like, unless it's, like, a charge of what the field is paying attention to. But interpersonally, which I, you know, this is talking about assholery and about individuals and how they act, like, I don't find that philosophers are incurious and simple-minded. That seems just, like, super ad hominem. Well, no, the pride and irrelevance, I think, that's the part that resonates because, you know, there is this debate about, like, is philosophy useless? And there is a, like, a kind of analytic philosopher, and I remember Peter Ludlow, a philosopher, I don't know if he's still at Northwestern, but was at Northwestern, when this debate was going down, wrote some long post about, like, it's not our job to be relevant.

38:33Like, we are getting at these truths. Now, what these truths are, or why they matter, or is it just, like, debasing the concept of truth to call them truths? Like, they don't even need, like, they just need the debate to exist. And that just justifies entering the debate with no, like, stepping back and asking, like, why is this worthwhile to us, to anybody? Like, we don't need, like, do mathematicians have to justify how useful and practical and why people should care about, like, you know, proving theorems?

39:08No, then we don't have to either. That's a view. We don't, I don't want to necessarily go into, like, rebutting that view, but that is a view that many philosophers will proudly profess. Yeah. Like, we can move on to Bernard Williams, but I do think that, like, if you take that statement, like, that they're proud of being ignorant and simple-minded, that sounds like not like what philosopher's sin is. Unless simple-minded and ignorant means something that I don't normally mean when I accuse people of that.

39:39Yeah, I guess ignorant just of, like, the wider world is what I think she means. Not ignorant, like, they're not educated or something like that. Yeah. But I should say, and then we really will move on to Williams, but the book that she's reviewing and that she discusses is more of an ideological critique. There's a lot of this stuff in it, but it's more of an ideological critique of the view that philosophers are somehow, like, coming at truth with a completely dispassionate and ideology-free way of just trying to discover truth.

40:16And the book is devoted to kind of exposing the lie behind it. So, very much in line with Marxist critiques of justice and a lot of the feminist critiques of people like John Rawls. Just this idea that you're, like, through this abstract theorizing, you are now free from any ideological prism. Yeah. And you are just dispassionately searching for the truth. It is a view that I think a lot of analytic philosophers have and that I think probably can't be justified in any way.

40:51However, based on, like, looking at other reviews and even her review, I don't know if the Sharinga does a great job in, like, making this case. But, yeah, so, like, I think that's, like, of the critiques of analytic philosophy, that kind of Marxist critical theory objection is one way of doing it. But Williams also focuses on, like, the scientist's critique, you know, like the kind of Neil deGrasse Tyson philosophers are worthless.

41:23Get out of the way. We're actually the ones who are going after truth in ways that we can demonstrate and have evidence behind it. And you guys are just putting up needless obstacles, whether it's people like Thomas Kuhn or just, you know, a philosopher of biology asking, like, what do you mean by fitness exactly? So, you know, I have very little – like, that's – if you want to see me being defensive of philosophy, like, put me in front of one of those people. Just bring up rationalia.

41:53Yeah, so, okay, like, let's talk about sort of the arguments that Williams is making because this turns – you know, this is a defense, I take it, a defense that still stings philosophy.

Two Forms of Hating Philosophy

42:05Yeah, it's a qualified defense of philosophy. Right. And so he has those two ways in which you could hate and despise philosophy. And actually, I don't – is hating and despising supposed to be – match the two different ways in which people have disdain for philosophy? Oh, maybe. I didn't think of that. This was the analytic philosopher in me. I was like, so what's the difference between hate and despise? And so he says the most radical form of complaint against philosophy is that it is as such irredeemably useless, that all of it is empty, pointless, word spinning, which wastes time and distracts people from worthwhile work.

42:43And, like, that is a separate view from, like, oh, in its professionalized form, it is those things. Which is, like, philosophy actually can be great, but we have reduced it to just mindless pedantry. It consists of exercises that are necessary for the structure of philosophy as providing an academic career. And I think that's a separate critique. Like, why would anyone care about it? Well, the reason people care about it is because it allows them to publish articles, which then allows them to either get a job or get tenure or – it's just the pressures of all of that.

43:23Now, I think this applies equally well, if not maybe more so, to science as well. Like, the professionalization of all academic fields, I think, has been a problem. And the other humanities, as William says. So, he says there's two – the two complaints. Yeah. The big complaint that it's all worthless intrinsically, which he says is often – like, and this is actually a tradition in which I was raised, that the religious rejection of philosophy as muddling thought and keeping you from true spiritual awareness.

43:54And then he says in the more modern form, as you were saying, there are the scientists who think that this is intrinsically just a waste of time. And I think the thing that he says about both of those is, unfortunately – and we saw this in Neil deGrasse Tyson – unfortunately, you get caught up in doing philosophy if you want to level that critique. So, it's like the very nature of having to criticize philosophy on those grounds requires those people to do some philosophy and they usually don't do it very well. You know, it's interesting that he's right that now the religious critique isn't as prevalent and now it's scientists who are doing this.

44:29But you can kind of see it in both cases, right? Like scholastic philosophy and the proofs for the existence of God that, like, you know, Aquinas would make and all – you know, you could see someone who is deeply religious and it was a matter of faith and conviction and, like, kind of personal experience and feeling connected to God, how that would be something that was almost like giving religion a bad name, that you were just, like, fussing around with these arguments that don't really work, you know?

45:00I mean, and it's like a sort of a waste of time. The criticism that, you know, the famous example is people who debate how many angels could fit on the head of a pin. Right. Did that actually happen? I don't know. Like, I feel like, yes, there was some actual – It's used as the – yeah. Yeah. And like I said, I was very much sort of raised with a – not directly, but like just a general be wary of philosophers because they can lead you astray. Like, philosophy can take you away from what you really need to focus on, which is your faith.

45:32But in the process, like, a lot of the theology is just philosophy that's specifically about, you know, taking different premises and going with those. Yeah. Except that it's about reason. Like, there is this idea that, like, belief in God can be rationally justified. And if that's not your view of religion, then, you know – Yeah, there is an anti-reason – like, there's – I forget who said this. It might be apocryphal, but I think it's attributed in Martin Luther, the reason is a whore that serves any master kind of thing. Like, because at the end of the day, what it is is faith.

46:04That's a great line. Reason is a whore that's, you know, slave of the passions, take a back seat to a whore that can serve any master. It's kind of like the John Hyte view, actually. It's kind of hot. Yeah. Exactly. It's a slutty reason.

46:22Who have you been defending today? Yeah. And there is some really painful philosophy of science, too, that I could see being a scientist and being annoyed by. Because it can be pointless word spinning that wastes time and distracts people. But, like, not only, I think, are people having to go to philosophy to make that argument, as you pointed out, well, I actually think, like, it's really important for scientists to take a step back.

46:52In the same way that it's important, you know, the same complaint I was making about analytic philosophy, that they never take a step back. And someone like Thomas Kuhn, who's a philosopher and who, like, I think that was very healthy, even if you don't agree with his particular critique or his view of paradigms and the way they change. Like, it is important to ask yourself this, especially in a professionalized environment where every incentive is just to keep spinning within the current paradigm, keep the status quo going.

47:23And we know, just from the history of science, that, like, sometimes those things are just, are worthless. They're built on sand. And the only way you can realize if something is built on sand is to take a step back and look at, you know, the methodology behind what you're doing. Yeah, absolutely. And to the extent that scientists, like, scientists in the social sciences, like Paul Meal or whatever, who have taken a step back and critiqued the field, like, they're doing something like philosophy.

47:53A hundred percent. Yeah. Even if they're not, like, in the philosophy department. Exactly. Like, what, and this, this is going to lead to, like, my just overall take on this, which is that philosophy, analytic philosophy specifically, which I think I have more of a soft spot than you do for it.

Rigor Versus Professional Bullshittery

48:08Um, yeah, for sure. Yeah. Um, there is this real value, or at least there are values that come with taking the attitude of analytic philosophers, which is to question the concepts and to, like, strive for clarity of argument and thought and to make distinctions and to make sure that you're not confusing things. And, and there's no slippage in the arguments you're making, and even in something like what I do in psychology, you can read an intro and see some basic just flaws in conceptual clarity.

48:41Like, all that stuff I think is really important. And the problem is, I also agree with the critiques of what analytic philosophy has become and, like, all the stuff that we've talked about over the years. And I kind of am, like, worried that that's the necessary side effect of taking the analytic philosophy approach and, like, encouraging it. Like, there's going to end up with this, like, professionalization and bullshittery that's happening. And that's the price that you pay for training people to be rigorous in thinking?

49:12Yeah, maybe. I mean, I still think also the professionalization. Like, if you took that out, because I think Hume was very rigorous. Diero could be rigorous. Descartes was definitely rigorous, but... Like, how do we train people then to be rigorous without having people who are there to teach them to be rigorous and then who have to also justify their position at a big research university, you know? You do what they do. You get, like, Catherine of the Great to, like...

49:42To subscribe to your sub stack? To fund you, yeah. Or you host salons, you know? It's true, but that's the thing, Walter Veidt. Like, this shit has been going on forever. Philosophers trying to get people to pay for their... No, but I mean, I think, like, you know, when you had a patron, you know, like, there were philosophers that would have patrons, or that they were just more commonly members of the aristocracy that didn't need to make money. So, yeah, you know, one thing that certainly this, the professionalization has done, to some extent, is democratize it.

50:15You know, like, I think just the existence of philosophers who aren't like this, though, shows that it could be. So, this is how Williams describes the second complaint, which is that philosophy does not have to be useless, but in its present forms mostly is. On this account, there is something that philosophy could do, indeed used to do, but which it is now forsaken. It could and should help us, but instead of doing so, philosophers spend their time on academic exercises that are technical and inaccessible.

50:46And he says this attitude was expressed by Roger Scruton, who doesn't despise philosophy as such, but he just thinks, you know, like, it should help you live a good life and confront, you know, he's very conservative, the moral morass that surrounds him. So, the idea is that it's too formal, it's too hard, and it's betrayed its promise of human helpfulness. You know, again, I have a lot of sympathy with this, but I think Williams' response to it has a lot of force.

51:17And Williams, I think, half agrees and half disagrees with it. Like, I really have mixed feelings about this, because in all academic fields, I think that it's important to have a freedom to study things that don't matter to anybody in any practical sense or in any way that will, like, improve lives. I feel like whenever you have to start justifying what you do as a humanist or as a scientist by what the direct value to somebody is, like some, you know, to like society is, then you stop being able to explore things in a way that might actually lead to the improvement of society or people's lives.

51:58But that might not. Like, I think that there's an important thing that academia does, which is encourage curiosity for the sake of curiosity. And sometimes what happens is that you get a whole bunch of people who are only talking to each other, and maybe it doesn't even matter. Like, even locally, it's meaningless. So, in other words, I don't think that philosophers should have to justify what they're doing by saying, my philosophy is going to improve anybody's life. It has this instrumental value. Yeah, yeah. But that means that we then have to have, like, this pocket of protected, like, work that leads to people doing, like, the dumbest shit.

52:36Like, you know, just think of all of the intro segments that we've done on, like, ridiculous philosophy, you know, or ridiculous psychology. And some of the most central debates, you know, they just like the knowledge debate. Right. That is a big bugbear of mine, and people have moved on from that, but they've moved on to that to some other bullshit, you know, like, doxastic blameworthiness or something. Yeah. And it's true. Maybe one of these things down the line somehow will never happen with Gettier cases and the knowledge debate in general.

53:08But I also think that there's a style of defense that I don't like, which I think this falls in the category of, which is basically, like, someone, say, paints something that looks like shit. Yeah. And then they say, well, yeah, well, you know, people said that about Van Gogh's paintings. Yeah. You know, like. No, I know. It's a very facile defense of anything. Yeah. To say, well, you know, like, people said this about Socrates, and, you know, look at that. Like, you have to do more than just point out that it's not logically impossible that this could somewhere down the line actually help people.

53:44You need to do, like, a step further to show something like what is the value of this beyond just you guys, the 14 people in the world who work on this issue, get to publish replies to each other that nobody would, like, dream of caring about if you weren't one of them. Yeah. No, totally. I mean, like, it feels as if one thing that should be protected if we set up these systems is, like, the ability to tell people that what they're doing is stupid. Yeah. But it is hard because sometimes you turn to, say, like, the, like, biggest name in epistemology, and you ask them about this junior scholar who's been just working on, like, whatever, you know, some subset of some subset of some subset of a Gettier argument.

54:27And they'll say, this kid is doing, like, amazing work, and this is going to revolutionize epistemology. And all you have is the testimony of another expert in the field to tell you whether or not that work is valuable. And they're going to tell you it's valuable. So it's hard to, like, from an external standpoint, evaluate whether it's actually worthless. And the people who I would say, like, maybe people like you who are trained enough to know what good and bad philosophy might be, at least on some definition, and not wrapped up in the incentive structure to, like, say that it's good or actually believe that it's good.

55:04Like, is it your job then to say, like, let's not hire that person? You know, let's not promote this stuff? Well, right. You're always thinking of that, you know, in tenure cases you do trust. You might think, oh, like, this stuff is such fucking bullshit. I can't believe that anyone works on this. But it's not your job to be, like, issuing judgments like that from on high if they're playing the game the right way and if they have people who can vouch for them. Right. If somebody says, like, look, this student has, like, you know, two articles in mind, one in news and one in, you know, and it's like, what are you going to say?

55:38And I've been in faculty meetings in psychology where, say, like a sharp scientist from another area, say, like, you know, a good person who does neuro is evaluating the candidates for, say, social. And they say things like, so, you know, this isn't my area, but, like, can somebody tell me, like, what the value is of this? And you know what they're doing is kind of an emperor has no clothes thing. They just, they can't say it, say it. And you're like, oh, yeah, that's probably good. It's a good point. It's so perverse because it seems inappropriate.

56:11Even to me, it seems inappropriate to question that for, like, basic things like, who do you hire? Who do you promote? Like, maybe not for who you hire, I think, in those cases, because you are kind of wondering about fit with the department and, like, will the students like them and will they be working on stuff that can excite people? But in anything, like, even peer-reviewing something sometimes, you sort of have to go with, like, what the standards of that particular debate is.

56:42And if they do the right thing, you almost feel like you're appointing yourself as some god who can just say, no, this is worthless. Even though it's internally within that debate, it's doing things the right way and making what counts as a nice objection in, you know, in that frame. Right, right. Because no one wants to get a review that says, taking a step back, like, why are we doing this? You know, because you would just be like, fuck you, guy.

57:12Or, you know. Which is why I've cut back on a lot of my peer-reviewing because I was starting to just do that, you know. We just take a step back. I was like, what's the point of all of this? But, like, again, that's the professionalization of it. Otherwise, it's just kingmakers, you know, like, making decisions on what counts as valuable and what counts as not. And that has an unpleasant taste, too. So it seems like we've all just settled on, all right, we're going to do this. But certainly at the detriment of this being of interest to the wider community or even the hypothetical community.

57:48What did you think of Williams' illustration of when philosophy is done in a way that matters? So he uses free speech. He says, like, here's a case where it's valuable if you're thinking about what free speech is. If, like, someone makes the claim that free speech should be protected, he says it's important in this case to know, like, okay, so why is free speech important? Is it because it is just a kind of, you know, some subset of freedom in general and we value freedom? Or do we think that free speech specifically is its own thing because of the role that it plays in, like, whatever, you know, political stuff?

58:20So he says people who have thought about this question are now able to give valuable input into this, you know, broader question that matters for society. Yeah. He says it ultimately kind of bottoms out in basic issues of philosophy of science and metaphysics. And metaphysics, yeah. I guess I found that to be a strange defense. Like, I feel like John Stuart Mill didn't go into the philosophy of science and metaphysics in his defense of free speech. And I think that's a pretty effective, like, I take the general point that, like, if you're talking about something like free speech, this is where, you know, philosophical defenses for it or philosophical critiques of it are really the only way.

59:04I don't see why he says that, you know, any question of political value will lead to basic issues in philosophy of science and metaphysics, unless he means, like, metaethics, maybe. Yeah. But that is a step too far. And maybe social sciences. Yeah. But the general point, like, you know, I was trying to think of, like, what value there is now. And like I said before, I really do think that the tools that analytic philosophy is trying to sharpen are very important. And you see it now, at least with, well, to bring up something we briefly talked about, like the animal welfare, what we believe about the moral badness of causing pain to sentient creatures leads you to ask the question of what sentience is and what pain is and what would constitute evidence for it, like what that even means.

59:54Because the questions that are being raised by AI for a lot of people, you know, and what consciousness is, the difference between consciousness and intelligence and whatever, pain, like all of those things. I think it's good to be rigorous in the way that we think about some of those things, lest we get sloppy and, you know, make arguments that end up being wrong. It could be that the training of analytic philosophy is going to be important for some of those things. And as a just sort of side effect, you're going to have like churning out professionalized philosophers who are working on some stupid subset of subset, which might even be worse than a bunch of scientists who are working on some random ass shit that doesn't matter.

1:00:31Because as Williams points out, like the notion of getting something right matters. And I think people accept that you can get something right in science. Like you can genuinely find out that like this species of frog has a weird mutation in their DNA that like matters. So like there's truth value to those things. And maybe in philosophy, there's a whole bunch of people who are just playing the game and not adding any, even like the smallest incremental value to like the truth that we have. Which is not how they see themselves. No, right.

1:01:01They have that scientist model, which is, yeah. Just to briefly return to the Lily Hugh piece, one of my favorite parts of it is when she says maybe a better way of looking at what Scheringa is doing is not ideological critique, but lowering the tone of the discipline. It tends to think of itself, she says, quoting Scheringa, as removed from the changing scenes of history. It acts as if it were pursuing its questions from a vantage point situated nowhere and in particular unaffected by social and political reality.

1:01:36To lower the tone of philosophy is to talk about it in a way that denies this air of lofty detachment. So I think that the reason you have the situation that you're having is precisely because they think they are contributing to truth. In a way that if pressed to explain how and, you know, to do the analytic philosopher thing, what do you mean by truth beyond like within this game that you've set up, you have done something that like follows the rules. But like, do we understand anything more about human life, the universe, anything like that?

1:02:13You know, I think often it would be hard to say yes to that question. You understand more about maybe some other person's argument and its weaknesses. So I think it is important like to sometimes expose and just as a way of making people reflect, as we've been saying, like the pretensions of these people. But yeah, like you say, like it would be bad if people because of this thought that philosophy just was just a bunch of things that could never lead to truth or truthfulness, as he likes to put it, that it was all just people saying shit.

1:02:49And it's funny to level this at analytic philosophy because this is often the charge against like continental philosophy, postmodern philosophy and stuff like that. Right. But, you know, that's where like the model of science that you're right to pair the Lilly Hugh Review or at least the discussion of that book with this.

Science, Style, and the Plain Text

1:03:07Williams, in talking about what he calls the baleful effects that science might have had on philosophy, as he says, science really does have an effective division of labor. It is, of course, true that great breakthroughs have been achieved by the transfer of skills between scientific fields, for instance, by John Maynard Smith, trained as an engineer, turning his attention to biology. But in everyday practice, there are perfectly well-established methods of getting local results. And even if the results are not very exciting, they are results. It follows from this that professional training exercises, however run of the mill, make a contribution not just to education, but to the subject itself.

1:03:40But as we have already sadly noted, this is not necessarily true of philosophy. So that division of labor and getting local results just may not have, like that model doesn't seem to work. No. And I do think this is the most important point I think that Williams makes is that that modeling yourself after science, which I think is like, you know, I haven't thought about this too rigorously, but the conceptual analysis method is kind of trying to do this. It is trying to generate results, you know, like one of the most absurd debates that we don't really do anymore, the Frege-Geach objection to non-cognitivism and meta-ethics.

1:04:21You know, that's a very technical debate where you can generate so many like results in this sense that you might think is like a scientist generating results. And maybe it leads somewhere, maybe it leads nowhere. But but this one was guaranteed to lead nowhere. And there was no tie to how this could end up actually illuminating something about ethics or like we mean by ethics or, you know, like the status of our moral claims. That is a real problem. And I think that the analytic style is because of the logical positivists in both Williams doesn't emphasize this, but Charinga apparently does.

1:05:01Like how much of that circle with Russell. Russell and Whitehead's project getting started and people like Frege and like, yeah. And Carnap and, you know, and actually some of those philosophers are pretty interesting on their own. But what what they left in their wake was exactly this thing where philosophy should be the handmaiden of science and it should model itself after science. And I think actually Williams is too optimistic about like science's potential in a lot of years. You would think that, yeah. Yeah. I mean, just the idea that scientists don't have to care about history in the way philosophers should care about history, I think, is wrong.

1:05:38Yeah, that's interesting. I battle with this because it's true that if you are studying organic chemistry, it's not going to do you that much good to like read about the humors, Galen's humors. Right. That idea. But knowing how paradigms have shifted or if you reject that framing, you know, just how different views, like how Newton's view relates to Einstein's view and how like people shifted from like those things, I think are really important to think about.

1:06:08Yeah. Yeah. I think you're right. So Williams gets in the end, like this is the section I thought you probably would really like when he says, you know, one of the bad things about philosophy is for some reason, and maybe it's the scientist's like way of thinking, where in science, it really is valuable to just be as plain spoken as possible because what you care about is communicating these results. And so stripping your language of style is sort of like the way to go. Probably you get dinged a bit if you're writing a scientific article and you're trying to add too much flavor. He says this is like terrible for philosophy.

1:06:46Yeah. And yet they have dove in to this approach, you know, with both hands and both feet, like philosophers have embraced this view. Now, I don't even know if it's right. Again, I don't know if it's right for science to be like that. Do you remember when like scientific articles were all supposed to be in the passive voice because you weren't supposed to like the scientists shouldn't be privileged. It was just about what happened. That was fucking painful. It's so weirdly still like, you know, you get grad students who are still think of this as like the more objective way of writing and have to like beat it out of them usually.

1:07:24Yeah. So this you're absolutely right to think. So he says the traditions of the plain style that are familiar in analytic philosophy have much to be said for them, but they can become a dead weight under the influence of the scientific model. One should not approach philosophical writing in the spirit of the analytic philosopher who in actual fact said to another when they were trying to write a book together. Let's get it right first. Let's get it right first. And you can put the style in afterwards. And like, this is the way I think that this is the biggest kind of degradation of philosophy is the writing.

1:07:58And I agree with Williams that the way you present something actually has an effect on like the substance of what it is that you're saying. Yeah. I came across a quote recently from Alistair McIntyre, a great writer and a philosopher in the analytic style where he's talking about himself as a 20 year old, like thinking about going into philosophy and like all the things that got him excited because he was doing a lot of reading.

1:08:28Uh, he, he, it's a similar position to how I was when I was 30, uh, he was only 20, but so he's talking about like the things that got him excited about philosophy said moreover, the genres and styles of their philosophical writings were so various Plato's dialogues, Aristotle's lecture notes, Lucretius's poem, famous Epicurean philosopher, T.S. Eliot's very different poems, Collingwood's autobiography, Aquinas. I don't know how to pronounce this question is Sartre's novels, as well as the contrasting styles of argument of Engels, Kierkegaard and Ayer.

1:09:05I knew, of course, that there were academic philosophy journals, but had the thought occurred to me that there might be some future time and place where the journal article would be considered the standard genre of philosophical writing, I would have dismissed this as a fevered fantasy. That is how naive I was when I was 20 years old. And, you know, like I came at it the same way and like, it is kind of remarkable that like all the things that get you excited about it, if you come at it, not because of academic, you know, you learned it as a major, but just you were reading about it and just all the different genres.

1:09:38Like what got me excited about it was like Jack the Fatalist and his master, like the novel by Diderot. Yeah, like Camus the Stranger. Oh, same here. Like the existentialist got me into it. Yeah. And the style of what they're doing and the substance, they're intertwined. I mean, Plato's dialogues, the fact that he wrote dialogues is fundamentally connected to how to understand Plato's philosophy, I think. Like, and we've just completely abandoned that. It's a bait and switch where you get baited by the wonderful writings of philosophers before you and then you get completely like disabused of any hopes of ever writing.

1:10:16By the end of grad school, you've learned to only value the journal article. Yeah. And you write like that. Like, I go back and look at some of the stuff that I've written and I was always, I tried to be on my guard against this and still, like, I can't believe that I was writing in the way that I was writing in a lot of cases. So Williams says, I like this paragraph, as those other authors and many others remind us, like, for instance, all the ones that you were just naming, moral and political philosophy demand more than such a style, the plain style.

1:10:46They may need to give us their picture of life in society and the individual. Moreover, a philosopher may need not merely to give us such a picture, but to give it in a way that integrates it with what he or she cares about. If a philosophical writer does not solve, as in many cases, or as in many cases does not even face the problems of how to express those concerns adequately, he or she will have failed to carry reflection far enough. So the demand that moral and political philosophy should sound right, should speak in a real voice, is not something arbitrarily imposed by those with a taste for literature or for history or for excitement. It follows from philosophy's ideal of reflectiveness, an ideal acknowledged in the subject's most central traditions.

1:11:21I think that's a deeper point than even I thought he was saying when I first read this paragraph or this section. Because I think that if you take this to heart, you will stop being capable of the bullshit. Yeah. I think it will be harder to engage in that kind of bullshit if you really start speaking with a voice and a style. And like as reading this just now, as you had just said that the structure of the dialogues are intrinsically important to the things that Plato is saying, like that you cannot separate the style and the substance that you're trying to communicate, I think is so true that what has happened is often you learn the bland style first.

1:12:08Like you learn how to write that way, like you learn how to write that way and that sterilizes your imagination. That infects the idea, that infects the substance. I realized just recently in something that I was writing that was intended eventually to be for a popular audience that my voice had become stripped of like voice, the idiosyncratic style of fun, really of fun, of like the kind of pleasure that infects my imagination that I think.

1:12:38It does at least just was not on the page because it had been like, you know, like it's like a nun had taken a ruler to my imagination, you know. I think you made two really important points there. Certainly, I agree that you learn this style or this form of writing and that constricts your imagination. It makes you much less interesting in terms of the ideas that you will want to present. So that's number one. I think that's absolutely right. Number two, when you say once you kind of wake up to this, it becomes very hard to re-engage in that style.

1:13:14And I've certainly struggled with that. Like I have a hard time reading and never mind writing in that style anymore. You know, all of this is in tension with something that I also believe, which is like I think I'm a good writer relative to a lot of analytic philosophers. And contrary to some of like what you might hear, that was never a problem for me. It was a benefit to me to be a good writer. Yeah. And, you know, I think it's a benefit to Susan Wolf to be a good writer. It's been a benefit to Bernard Williams, to Alistair McIntyre.

1:13:46Like the people who are good writers to Thomas Nagel is a great writer of philosophy and I think rewarded for it. So, you know, like why this has happened, I think, is kind of an interesting question, because I think if people do try to be a good writer, like I bet Lily Hu, who I take is a very good writer just based on this one thing that I've read for her. She seems like she's doing well. She's a professor at Yale now. She went to Harvard, you know, like think of that opening paragraph that she published in the analytic, like, you know, a prime analytic philosophy journal mind.

1:14:19Like, frankly speaking, the analytic philosopher can be a bit of an insufferable asshole is the first sentence. You would think, oh, no, they'll never let you get away with that. But they do. If you can kind of pull it off. So why has this happened? Like, why on the one hand do people appreciate good writing, but still not, it's not encouraged or developed by the people practicing it is, I think, related to the model after the sciences, as William said. And in particular, this idea that there should be progress in philosophy.

1:14:52Yeah. But I'll always remember Simon Blackburn telling me, we were talking about this stuff in the interview I did with him in the Very Bad Wizard book, the second edition of that book, which you wrote a very well written forward to. But he said that philosophy has decided that it needs to make progress. It needs to get results. Maybe he even made the science analogy there. But like, he's like, I think it should have modeled itself more on the humanities or the arts. Nobody says, oh, we need to write better plays than Shakespeare or than Aeschylus or Esopheles.

1:15:26Nobody says we need to be composing better symphonies. We need to make progress on our symphony writing, you know, like there is just this understanding that these things can contribute to the value of life. They can illuminate certain things about the human experience or what it means to be in this universe without it being, you know, like this maybe naive view of science where we're just learning more and more and more and more every year. And, you know, this is not even naive.

1:15:58It's true. Like, we know way more than what Aristotle did. But is the philosophy better than when Aristotle and Plato were writing? No, like not at all. But the science is. So, like, that's another thing I think that's like fundamentally misguided maybe that analytic philosophy has encumbered itself with. So then full circle, this is why I think we really should value the kind of public philosophy that's being done on Substacks.

1:16:29But and even as I was thinking, you know, one of the paradoxes for me was, why is it that now when I'm putting pen to paper, I find my writing to be sterile? But I never find my conversation like on this podcast to be sterile. There's like a joy infused in the ways that I communicate that I hope are infectious and that people can recognize. So these forums are giving, I think, a reminder that when you talk to people who aren't in these subfields that we're in, that it's important to find a voice and communicate the style with the substance.

1:17:08You know, this should be valued more. Yeah. You know, he has this quote where he says, the hopes that still exist for philosophy as an enlightening and constructive discipline are threatened by its being made into an academic routine, just as they are being advertised as offering instantly accessible help. In both cases, what philosophy loses is a quality which is essential to it, whatever questions that is addressing and intense attention to what it is saying and to the question of whether what it is saying is not only true, but rings true.

1:17:43In this sense, good philosophy on any theme will display some kind of urgency or intensity and routine philosophy will lack it. So for him, it goes back to this idea of it ultimately being a discipline that should have some conception, however loose, of being true. But there is this additional demand as a philosopher that what you say is not just true in whatever technical sense counts for your debate, but it rings true.

1:18:15And that idea of ringing true gets to what you're just talking about. You know, in the same way that Kate Mann's stuff rings true when she talks about gaslighting or misogyny and all of that. And so, like, the thing that public philosophy forces you to do is to actually care about whether something isn't just technically right, but it actually rings true to people beyond that technical debate. Totally. It's a great way of putting it. Any other thoughts on this?

Uncomfortable Truths and Birthday Drinks

1:18:46No, you know, there's just a little bit at the end that I guess was worth saying that he has this section where he talks about, like, one of the important things that philosophy should do is to be able to tell uncomfortable truths. Yeah. Which, yeah, I think is valuable, but all of the other stuff is required. And, like, we haven't focused on this, but he is also in a debate in this piece with people like Richard Rorty, who don't see philosophy as a model of truth-seeking, but rather just conversation, like you were there.

1:19:17And this is something that he would then go on to, like, write his last book, Truth and Truthfulness. But he's a very interesting figure in this regard because he's also, like, a Nietzschean, and Nietzsche didn't, like, see philosophy in that kind of – but, like, Bernard Williams is very much in the spirit of – like, his critiques of ethics are so in line with Nietzsche. And this is the challenge because you want somebody who has the sharp tools that, like, are honed through that analytic style, but who is clear enough to see that that's not enough.

1:19:56They can see through. And, you know, like, that's – I see what the lowering the tone idea is in what Lily Hugh is saying. Like, lowering the tone is important – can be important just to be able to see through what's going on. And I think Williams is one of the best at doing that. But, you know, he also wants to reject the more radical views of Nietzsche and Nietzscheans and the pragmatists. And, you know, that's an uncomfortable tension for him sometimes.

1:20:27Yeah. But uncomfortable tensions are good. Just like our uncomfortable tension in ending this episode right now because it's your birthday and you need to go and celebrate. It's my birthday and I've got to go get fucked up. All right. Well, do better analytic philosophy and join us next time on Very Bad Wizards. The great end of us has spoken.

1:20:51Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain. Anybody can have a brain.

1:21:22You're a very bad man. I'm a very good man. Just a very bad wizard.