0:00

Very Bad Wizards is a podcast

0:02

with a philosopher, my dad, and

0:04

psychologist Dave Pizarro, having an informal

0:06

discussion about issues in science and

0:08

ethics. Please note that the

0:10

discussion contains bad words that I'm not

0:13

allowed to say, and knowing my dad,

0:15

some very inappropriate jokes. We in

0:17

comparison to that enormous

0:20

articulation, we only sound

0:23

and look like badly

0:25

pronounced and half-finished sentences

0:27

out of a stupid

0:30

suburban novel. Good

0:56

man. They

1:00

think deep thoughts and with no more brains than

1:02

you have. Anybody

1:10

can have a brain. You're

1:14

a very bad man. I'm

1:17

a very good man, just a

1:19

very bad wizard. Welcome

1:22

to Very Bad Wizards. I'm Tamler

1:24

Summers from the University of Houston.

1:26

Dave, my long national nightmare is

1:28

finally over. My house once

1:30

again has a dog in it. Can you

1:33

guess? Holy. Yeah, I know. I didn't tell

1:35

you yet. What the fuck? Yeah. This is

1:37

like, I'm literally hearing this for the first

1:39

time. I interrupted your question though. Okay, what?

1:42

Can you guess what her name is? That

1:44

was the question. Ann

1:48

Coulter. I don't know. Really?

1:51

That's... I don't know. It was

1:54

just on my mind. What is this? Like 2006 or something like

1:56

that? That

1:58

was not his life. Lil' Kim, Lil' Kim.

2:01

It's Lil' Kim. No,

2:04

it's Trixie. Oh,

2:06

no way! Yeah. That's

2:09

awesome. That was awesome. For

2:11

our Ambulators listeners, definitely

2:14

played a role in it. So

2:16

yeah, I haven't even said

2:18

because I hadn't been ready to speak

2:20

about it publicly, but Charlie died a

2:22

couple months ago, soon after Omar did.

2:24

And it was just like I had

2:26

already talked about Omar, gotten a lot

2:28

of nice, you know,

2:30

well wishes and I couldn't just do that all over

2:32

again for Charlie. And it was honestly, it was just

2:34

horrible. Like to have to go from a house, like

2:37

I've lived in a house without a dog in 25

2:39

years, 26 years

2:41

or something like that. And then all of a sudden

2:43

it's gone empty. But no more. We

2:45

went to the SPCA. I wasn't even the one

2:47

that like kind of drove it. So, Isaac was

2:49

home for the weekend and

2:52

just like her and

2:54

Jen just said, let's go to the SPCA, let's just

2:56

do this. You know, she's here. She'll have

2:58

some kind of say in it. And we

3:00

just came back with Trixie. I was like,

3:02

are we sure we're ready? Like, I mean,

3:04

you know, yeah. That makes me

3:07

so happy. That's the best news I've gotten all

3:09

week. That's awesome, man. I'm happy for you. So

3:11

what does she look like? How old is she?

3:14

Like what? She's like three and a half months.

3:17

They say like a shepherd mix, but

3:19

she looks like a total mutt, like

3:22

a, you know, like

3:24

a little bit of everything. A stew. But

3:27

she's black. She's got

3:29

big ears. I think she's going to

3:31

be about 50 pounds. Hopefully I'm a

3:33

little worried she's too small, but she's

3:35

young and she's, she's got a little

3:37

potty training issues that we're working out

3:39

this week. We've just had her for

3:41

a few days. I remember when

3:44

I had my dog at first and I

3:46

was having potty training issues. I

3:48

remember you weren't very patient with me. You told

3:51

me, just keep them in the cage. Like I

3:53

don't know what's wrong. Like why? Why? So

3:56

that's what I'm going to tell you. Yeah. She

4:00

just shits it off for great.

4:02

Hahaha. Trixie!

4:06

We gotta get Sigrady to start listening to

4:08

you. That's for you. She's a total sweeter.

4:10

Don't beat her, man. Don't beat her. I

4:12

don't. That's never a problem. It's always the

4:14

other end of the spectrum. The worry with

4:16

me and then dog. At least

4:18

it's not gay now. That's right.

4:20

Yeah, you're normal. Hahaha.

4:24

Hahaha. Hahaha.

4:28

But you know, I did feel a little bit like,

4:30

but are we being disloyal to Charlie and Omar? You

4:32

know, this is Charlie of Shut the Fuck Up Charlie.

4:36

But you guys just gotta move on. And it's just

4:38

too depressing to come home. And there's nobody in the

4:40

house. You know, I

4:42

like to picture Charlie and

4:44

Omar like Darth Vader and Yoda

4:46

when they were like ghosts. Yeah, yeah,

4:49

yeah. Proudly. Hahaha. I

4:53

like that's good. I was gonna use the

4:55

technical term force

4:57

ghosts, but I didn't think you would get it.

4:59

Yeah, that's, I'm glad you over explained,

5:03

or for me just explained. Alright,

5:05

what do we have on tap today? Enough of

5:07

my life. In

5:10

the second segment, we'll be digging into the

5:12

differences, the often

5:14

hostile differences between analytic

5:17

and continental philosophy via

5:20

a really good 2003 paper by Neil Levy,

5:24

a veteran of the early 2000s free

5:26

will and moral responsibility blogosphere. But

5:31

first, the University of

5:33

Austin. There's breaking news on

5:36

the University of Austin, Texas. We

5:39

had some fun talking about them back

5:42

when Barry Weiss put out, it

5:44

was like three years ago or something, like a kind of- Yeah, it was

5:46

only two years ago. I was looking this up. No,

5:48

it was 2012, like four years ago. Was it 2021? Yeah.

5:52

Yeah, yeah, November 2021. She

5:54

put out this article on

5:56

her sub stack introducing the

5:58

University of Austin. The writer

6:00

of that was Pano Canelos, who

6:03

quit his job at, I don't know,

6:05

some Catholic university in- St.

6:08

John's. In Annapolis, yeah, St. John's. And

6:11

it was like anti-woke university. We

6:14

are going to have the conversations

6:16

that don't happen in the woke

6:19

academia right now. And they had like this coming

6:21

out post, and then when

6:23

you go to their website, it was like

6:25

all of these people, right? It was like

6:28

Steve Pinker, Leon Cass, John Hight, Glenn Lowry,

6:30

Tyler Cowan. And it was like, whoa.

6:32

Yeah. You know, maybe

6:35

this is not just a grift,

6:37

maybe this is- Right, but they

6:39

all almost immediately just

6:42

withdrew their, whatever association

6:44

they have. You know, and some of

6:46

them- They backed into that bush like

6:48

Palmer Simpson, like all of a sudden,

6:50

they were just disappeared. It just removed

6:53

from the website. Yeah, and I think

6:55

it's because Pano, whatever, painted up like

6:57

this picture of modern universities as some

6:59

kind of Stalinist or

7:01

Maoist regime that

7:04

runs those places. And like,

7:06

it was so unreflective of

7:09

the modern universities, like how it

7:11

actually runs right now, that even

7:13

all those people who have a

7:15

lot of sympathy with the general

7:17

like anti-social justice warriors, and to

7:19

use the parents of that era,

7:21

but they just couldn't support it.

7:23

They had to get out, because

7:25

they know, they actually do teach

7:27

it at these universities, and so

7:29

they know. So anyway- Exactly. One

7:32

of the things we had fun like

7:34

ridiculing them about was their idea of

7:36

a summer, their

7:38

summer school of forbidden courses,

7:41

right? Well, especially because like they announced

7:43

immediately that they had plans to become

7:45

a full fledged university within like two

7:47

years or whatever. You know, they were

7:49

gonna rapidly develop a curriculum, and it

7:51

just seemed ridiculous that they could get

7:53

that up and running. And that they

7:55

announced these like, at

7:58

first it was like online forbidden courses. two

8:00

week sessions was like, yeah. And

8:02

they had no address. It was kind of

8:04

the peak of that time

8:06

where a lot of the, you

8:09

know, like actual big time centrist

8:11

anti-woke intellectuals like Pinker or Hite

8:13

or, you know, like this was

8:15

something they would get behind and

8:17

then they, I don't know why.

8:20

It just landed with such a thud.

8:22

Yeah, we didn't hear anything about it

8:24

for like a long time. Not a

8:26

peep for like two and a half

8:29

years, blessed years. To be fair, not

8:31

that we were checking regularly, I guess. Yeah,

8:33

like I don't know where you would check. I

8:35

feel like we read the things where they would

8:38

be announced. Anyway,

8:40

we now, that has changed

8:43

via an article that

8:45

seems like it would be written

8:48

only so we could talk about

8:50

it. It's like an embedded reporter

8:52

telling us about their experience in

8:55

the scandalous summer series, Forbidden

8:58

Courses. Gone so journalism at its

9:00

finest. Absolutely.

9:03

Yeah, so I was excited. We're gonna get

9:05

some fodder on update about what's been going

9:07

on. This guy actually signed up for one

9:09

of the Forbidden Courses. He's

9:12

gonna tell us all about what it's like from

9:14

the inside. It looks like they got some sort

9:16

of Texas accreditation, you know, so that's an exciting update.

9:19

Yeah, it's very light on those kinds

9:21

of details, which I would love to

9:23

have known. But this is

9:25

by Noah Rawlings is the author's name

9:27

and it's the journal New Inquiry, which

9:30

I'm not familiar with. Yeah, and you

9:32

know, one of us put it in

9:34

the slack. I honestly don't remember. We

9:36

both just probably read the opening paragraph

9:38

and thought, oh, this is too easy.

9:41

But this was a huge disappointment

9:43

for us and we're gonna make this in

9:46

part about us like

9:49

our conflict. But like, imagine

9:52

my surprise that this turns out to

9:54

be a really hard

9:56

thing to enjoy talking about.

10:00

Because we have these two

10:02

conflicting reactions to things going

10:04

on internally That it's

10:06

very hard to know what to do with

10:08

it you know like on the one hand

10:10

who could be more insufferable and Just

10:13

awesome to make fun of then like

10:15

the University of Austin and the poor

10:18

suckers who like signed up for their

10:20

forbidden courses summer camp, but on the

10:22

other hand Oh Trying

10:27

to do like a satire hatchet

10:29

job and it's brutal It's

10:31

like I feel like it's the opposite

10:33

of how you should approach doing a

10:35

piece like this It was like a

10:37

twist an M night Shyamalan twist for

10:39

me by the end. I

10:42

was slightly more I wouldn't

10:44

say in favor of the University of Austin

10:47

I Exactly. I was like buying their

10:49

swag Having a

10:52

little flag you're writing like a cover

10:54

letter to be one of their summer

10:56

guest speakers I mean, I was a

10:58

little offended that they didn't ask me to be on the advisory

11:00

board, but yeah They

11:03

I don't think they like anti-semites though. That's

11:05

the one you can't that's true. Yeah, that's

11:07

true You can be a like anti Hard

11:12

out here for So

11:16

the first few lines are the

11:18

University of Austin is not in

11:20

Austin Not yet. It's

11:22

200 miles northeast in Dallas on

11:25

an office complex owned by mr.

11:27

Harlan crow of Clarence

11:29

Thomas I give you gifts. They're

11:32

illegal like In the

11:34

hundreds of thousands of dollars, whatever I read

11:36

that name. I feel like we should say

11:38

Harlan crow He

11:42

does sound like like a

11:44

noir villain who owns all the

11:46

orange like groves or whatever So

11:54

it's kind of funny that it's we don't get any

11:57

sense of when or even if they plan

11:59

on action locating in Austin,

12:01

do we? I didn't get a

12:03

sense. Did they say how much

12:05

it costs to

12:07

take these courses? No, but apparently

12:10

they put out a call

12:12

for students to apply for

12:14

their summer forbidden courses

12:16

camp and he applied

12:19

and got it. Cream of the crop.

12:21

Cream of the crop as Peter Vigosian

12:24

says. So Peter Vigosian, a

12:26

friend of the podcast, and

12:28

we had James Lindsay, his

12:31

co-author for that conceptual

12:33

penis hoax on way

12:35

back. Along with Helen

12:38

Pluckrose, the SoCal squared.

12:40

Yeah, yeah. What

12:42

was it? The conceptual penis and

12:45

something? Yeah, something like that. Yeah,

12:47

yeah. In a paper published journal.

12:49

That was the That

12:51

was the very, like those were the days, you know.

12:53

He quit his job at

12:56

Portland State or wherever

12:58

he was and I think like

13:00

he was an instructional professor and

13:03

he's now he's a central figure

13:05

at the University of Austin and

13:07

our author sat next to him

13:09

on the bus to get to

13:11

the complex and you

13:13

know like it starts out it's a little

13:15

annoying but you know you feel like oh

13:18

my god this is gonna be good you

13:20

know right like he starts talking to him

13:22

about how you need to exercise as an

13:24

intellectual and then it

13:26

gets to you got to get into jiu-jitsu Peter

13:29

did jiu-jitsu he says

13:31

he could murder everybody on this bus and

13:33

nobody could stop me it's a superpower. Yeah,

13:38

which do

13:41

people talk that way? You literally say I

13:43

could murder every single person on this bus.

13:46

It's like 50-50 for me whether

13:48

like anything that is reported actually happened

13:50

like some of it sounds right like

13:52

I totally buy that he does jiu-jitsu

13:55

like that is exactly what those kinds

13:57

of people do but You

14:00

know, right. So yes, I was on

14:02

board at this point. I was like,

14:04

yeah, Peter, promotion, maybe a little wary,

14:06

but on board. Yeah. Yeah. So the

14:08

author is taking of the four forbidden

14:11

courses, Katie Roy fee, sexual

14:13

politics course. We can talk about some of

14:15

the other courses that are on

14:18

offer, but a big

14:20

chunk of the next section is on

14:22

the opening dinner and the lectures. And here's

14:25

where I think both of us jumped ship

14:27

from this article and realized this

14:31

is going to be tough to figure

14:34

out what to do with. Do you

14:36

have the very paragraph that you have

14:38

it on? Yeah, it's funny. Cause we

14:40

tried to record earlier

14:42

on this and had to kind of abort. We

14:45

have to pull the, maybe, maybe we're going to have

14:47

to again, but, um, don't

14:50

know where we're going to tackle this. We're going to get

14:52

through it. I

14:54

hope the listeners can understand just

14:56

the forces that are opposing each

14:58

other in our breasts,

15:01

but intra psychic

15:03

tension and collision. So

15:10

here's where we just decided, Oh God, I

15:12

got this guy's kind of insufferable too. Um,

15:15

we were served some kind of

15:17

marinated chicken and left to mingle

15:19

us. The well groomed top of

15:21

the top, us the forbidden. Don't

15:26

do that. Just okay. We'll talk

15:28

about why. Capital F

15:30

capital F for the capital F forbidden.

15:33

We numbered 50 or so we

15:35

came from places like Harvard and

15:37

Stanford and Chicago and MIT and

15:39

U Penn. There was James who

15:41

studied computer science. There was Cameron

15:43

who also studied computer science. David

15:45

and Peter studied computer science while

15:47

Luke and Albert studied computer science.

15:49

As for Mike and Jason, the

15:51

former studied computer science whereas the

15:53

latter studied computer science. Ethan

15:56

was not unlike max in that

15:58

both studied computer science. Some

16:00

people studied business too. Okay,

16:03

I even dislike you a little bit

16:05

just because you read it. I

16:09

went by the end. Part

16:12

of this is also just an open call to

16:14

our listeners to do this piece the right way

16:17

because the right way to do it isn't to

16:19

try to indulge

16:21

your satirical whimsy, your

16:24

sense of yourself is like H.L. Mencken or

16:27

Ogden Nash or something like that. No,

16:30

just report what's going on. You have

16:32

the University of, this is the easiest

16:35

thing to make fun of but you

16:37

have to not put yourself into it.

16:39

You have to let them do it.

16:41

And this is all about this

16:43

guy being clever and snide

16:45

and smug to the point

16:47

where I feel like,

16:50

not like I want to defend

16:52

the University of Austin people but I don't

16:55

know. If I had to describe

16:58

everything you're saying, right, I

17:00

was right about what he shouldn't be doing. It

17:03

seems to me that just subtlety, just a

17:05

little bit of subtlety, it is, I

17:08

am putting a hat on a hat on a hat.

17:10

And we're all, yeah. So then

17:12

he talks about the student demographics and

17:14

not surprisingly 80% of them are white,

17:17

70% over our men. I'm

17:19

actually surprised there were so many women. I

17:22

know, right, yeah. What's going

17:25

on with you if you're going to this and

17:27

you're a woman? There's

17:29

no black people there, zero. Again,

17:32

not surprising. There's a

17:34

total of 50 people. Then we

17:37

get the opening lectures, the

17:41

welcome to the

17:43

inaugural class of the University

17:45

of Austin, Forbidden Courses summer

17:47

series. And Pano,

17:49

Paulo or whoever said, you're

17:54

so anti-Greek. You know? I don't

17:56

know what it's a Greek. I've

17:59

never liked the Greek. The author writes that

18:01

he says I he told

18:03

us we weren't starting a university. We

18:05

were a university In

18:08

all but the literal sense This

18:14

is what a university looks like people

18:16

coming together for conversations much like the

18:19

ones we've been having over our complementary

18:21

chicken dinners Dialogue he

18:23

said from the Greek logos Oh

18:28

To let two rational beings again

18:30

This is like these two things

18:32

like which can be more annoying

18:34

two rational beings engaged in rational

18:37

discourse He smiled we smiled and

18:39

with a little further ado He introduced

18:41

Peter whom the other students

18:44

had not had the good fortune

18:46

of meeting again Don't fucking say

18:48

that we get it if a

18:50

guy's talking to you about jujitsu

18:52

on the bus like obviously It's

18:55

not good fortune to meet them. You don't

18:57

need to say that that's the problem with

18:59

this piece and And

19:02

Pano says that Peter was kicking butt

19:04

in the righteous name of freedom Okay

19:07

here and then okay, and then here comes my

19:09

second least favorite. Yeah Section

19:12

yeah read this so he's describing Peter

19:15

because in coming onto stage

19:17

He says Peter springs to the center

19:19

of the room the air pressure changes

19:21

a buzz a hum a current about

19:23

us He brims with a frenzied energy

19:25

something is happening. He's gonna give us

19:28

a taste of what's to come He

19:30

says this is the kind of intellectual

19:32

activity. We're gonna experience at University of

19:34

Austin We're going to grapple with big

19:36

issues. We're gonna be daring fearless undaunted

19:38

We're going he says to do something

19:40

called street epistemology Now

19:44

so keep going yeah Peter

19:46

Bagosian talking about street

19:49

epistemology Should be the

19:51

funniest thing you've ever read in your

19:53

whole life This should have been a

19:55

500 word essay about Peter

19:57

Bagosian Street epistemology. That's it. Yeah

20:00

or just a video of Peter

20:02

Bogosian doing this. There's

20:04

no comment necessary for this

20:06

stuff. That's my point. So

20:11

yeah, by the end of this, I'm like, is

20:13

Peter Bogosian really that bad? Which

20:16

again, is a thought that I don't think I

20:18

should be having. But I'm like, is that so

20:20

fair? I feel like you could describe, you could

20:22

say shit like that about my lecturing style, like

20:24

in a frantic, spastic

20:27

manner. Well, no, say that, because we'll

20:29

get to a point where I think

20:31

you're really right there. So he says,

20:34

continuing, what is street epistemology? He'll demonstrate.

20:36

It's one of two things he does,

20:38

the other being jiu-jitsu. I'm

20:41

sure he was very proud of that, like

20:43

little callback. I don't have a life, he

20:46

says, I talk to strangers and I wrestle

20:48

strangers. It's one of- Sorry, I'm laughing so

20:50

hard that you're proud of his little callback

20:52

because it's- Yeah. I

20:57

just pictured him on his laptop, looking

20:59

up into the left and being like,

21:01

yeah. Exactly. Oh

21:04

God, they're gonna love this. I'm gonna get

21:06

so much pussy from this. First

21:12

byline. I don't have a life,

21:14

he says. I talk to strangers

21:16

and I wrestle strangers. Like, I

21:19

wanna believe he really said that, you know?

21:21

But we have to, and

21:24

if he did, you know, it's

21:26

funny because earlier he said that he had

21:28

children. I

21:31

know, seriously. It's

21:34

serious divorce dad energy. I think that this

21:36

is why he's doing this. Apologies

21:39

to Peter Vigosian's kids if you're

21:41

listening. And to divorce dad.

21:43

And to divorce dad. But

21:45

before we do street epistemology, Peter

21:48

needs to think of some questions.

21:50

He turns us back to the

21:52

audience, punches slightly in stride, stroking

21:54

his chin. He is Rodin's thinker

21:56

set in manic motion. He is

21:59

a relentless- logician in his study

22:01

at midnight. He is a frantically

22:03

philosophical gremlin. Bam! He wheels around

22:05

and stalks forward and slings his

22:07

index finger out towards the student,

22:09

demands of him whether climate change

22:11

is real and how certain is

22:13

he and why? Bop! He turns

22:15

to another student and asks whether

22:17

gender is a social construct, whether

22:19

trans women are women? Question

22:22

mark exclamation point. Bam!

22:26

Bam! And bop! are in all caps. It's

22:28

like you were saying, there's no comment

22:31

necessary, there's no like over-the-top,

22:35

you know, mockery necessary. You just

22:37

have to let them, let

22:39

him do it. I want to

22:41

see this. Like, I think this

22:44

could be one of the most cringiest

22:46

things you could imagine. And

22:48

then... And he managed to make his write-up

22:50

of it even cringier. Or as

22:53

cringy. Or as cringy. But the other thing

22:55

is I don't trust any

22:57

of this, right? I know.

22:59

I feel like he picked some

23:01

examples that make it seem extra. I mean,

23:03

is Peter Bergogian really just...

23:05

Is street epistemology just pointing at people

23:08

and yelling while you ask a

23:10

question? Like, I don't even think... I

23:12

assume it's more than that

23:14

and also cringier than that.

23:16

If you actually got it

23:18

on its own un... Unremarkable.

23:22

He staggers and weaves as a boxer

23:24

dances, so Peter lectures. He's the professor

23:26

you never had. He's a squall of

23:29

raw intellect. He is Robin Williams in

23:31

the Dead Boat Society but ripped. He's putting a gun

23:33

to the head of your most precious assumptions. I'm done

23:35

with this. I don't even want to talk about this.

23:37

I know, I know. I agree. I'm done. I'm done.

23:40

It's very frustrating. I'm very

23:43

mad at you, Noah Rawlings.

23:45

I feel like

23:47

this needs to be redeemed. I

23:49

don't want to feel like I

23:52

have to defend Peter Bergogian. Just

23:55

a couple of other just facts about

23:57

it. We won't go down into the...

24:00

We're like not even a third of the

24:02

way through the article. Yeah, it's very and

24:04

it gets more political and I probably agree

24:07

Substantively with this author on

24:10

most political issues Definitely.

24:12

He's like he's from a particularly

24:15

annoying corner of the left

24:18

but a

24:20

couple other guest speakers that were there Seth

24:23

Dillon of the Babylon be color

24:28

the onion for like

24:30

conservatives, so I

24:32

went to the Babylon be today just

24:36

So they were I guess his speech was

24:39

about You

24:41

know how Elon Musk saved comedy

24:43

by reinstating Babylon be to Twitter

24:47

here's the kind of comedy that you

24:49

can get at the Babylon be the

24:53

the unwoke onion National

24:56

guardsmen being trampled by migrants

24:58

glad to hear we're not

25:00

being invaded That's

25:02

their lead headline Shrek

25:05

prosecuted after trying to remove

25:07

squatters from swamp. I guess

25:10

that's another immigration thing Like

25:14

they've moved on from from New

25:16

Yorker style comics of Bathrooms

25:18

with ten different gender markers on them

25:21

and stuff like that. That was the

25:23

hilarity a few months This is very

25:25

actually immigrant focus this Mexico

25:28

begins constructing wall to keep

25:30

illegal immigrants from coming back

25:34

is one of them Let's guess

25:36

a little funny You

25:38

think It's

25:49

I'm telling you it's this article To

25:54

this that was kind of a thing.

25:56

It's radicalized you yeah, you're totally like

25:58

here. You know you're Nicholas stalk

26:00

us now, you're gonna be Eric Weinstein

26:02

in like two weeks. Like

26:06

it's just it's just so enough, it's

26:08

just not funny, right? With women unable

26:11

to distinguish between basketball and hockey, about

26:13

to smoke your March Madness bracket again.

26:19

So the author is taking

26:21

Katie Royfus sexual politics course.

26:23

I guess she's a like

26:28

my stepmother kind of zone

26:31

of talking about feminism and but

26:34

then the other three courses are the

26:37

psychology, the psychology of morality with Rob

26:40

Henderson, a would-be Jordan

26:42

Peterson, he says science and

26:44

Christianity with geophysicist and IQ

26:46

fetishist Dorian Abbott, whom

26:49

you could hear saying things like I

26:51

hate feminism, a grin twisting his face.

26:54

Anglo-American grand strategy is the third

26:57

course taught by Walter Russell Mead.

26:59

I mean oh my god. That's

27:01

a title that I would use

27:03

if I didn't want people registered

27:05

for my class. So your whole

27:07

family dies if you

27:10

don't take one of these courses, which one do

27:12

you take? It's

27:14

such an easy answer for me. Yeah. It's

27:17

science and Christianity with geophysicist and

27:19

IQ fetishist Dorian Abbott. I

27:22

really want to hear what kind of

27:25

Christian apologetics I would get

27:27

in there. Would I get some

27:29

facts? Like would he talk about

27:31

how the flood was proven or

27:33

something? He would talk facts about

27:36

race and IQ. And I'm definitely

27:38

already an IQ fetishist, obviously. Fellow

27:40

IQ fetishist. I just want to

27:43

see a grin

27:47

twisting his face as he says

27:49

I hate feminism. Okay, that's off

27:52

the table

27:54

now. Which one do you take? I don't

27:56

know, okay, because the psychology of morality... You

28:00

know, I know

28:03

too much about it and

28:05

I don't I don't I think I would just

28:07

get bored I think it's like probably like evil

28:09

psych stuff. Like why is this a forbidden course?

28:11

I think there's got to be some evil psych

28:14

Yeah with like about the sordid of mating

28:17

and the ethics of sexuality or something cuz

28:19

I yeah I don't know because because talking

28:21

about the prisoners dilemma and sin selection doesn't

28:25

know should be forbidden but I

28:29

Think so. I don't think I'm doing that

28:33

Like I agree science and Christianity. I

28:35

want to see I want to see

28:37

some IQ fetishism, but Then

28:40

I think I might go the sexual politics

28:42

course Like I think it sounds a little

28:44

dreary and I'm sure it would be annoying

28:47

to be with a bunch of dudes talking

28:49

with Like but I still think that I

28:51

mean like Anglo-american grand strategies off the table

28:53

by this old, you know, like The

28:57

political theorist or something like just sounds

28:59

brutal I think I would

29:01

go with the sexual politics, but

29:03

it's a what you're rolling the dice because it could be

29:06

the worst course Yeah, right.

29:09

Yeah, I think we got the right

29:11

answer science and Christianity. Yeah, we're always

29:13

we're always flirting with Christian apologetics anyway

29:16

Yeah All right

29:19

Should we wrap this up then? Yeah. Yeah

29:23

And we'll be right back to talk about

29:25

another Clash

29:29

of equally opposing

29:31

forces continental and

29:34

analytic philosophy You

30:30

Welcome back to Very Bad Wizards. This is

30:32

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it even more. Thank you so much.

33:27

Let's get back to the episode. Alright let's

33:29

get to our main topic.

33:31

Analytic and Continental Philosophy Explaining

33:33

the Differences. This is a

33:35

2003 article by Neil Levy.

33:38

Neil Levy who I've met maybe

33:40

a couple times but no primarily

33:42

from the like golden age of

33:44

free will moral responsibility blogging at

33:46

the Garden of the Forking Paths

33:48

and flickers of freedom when like

33:51

actually like blogs were a way to get

33:54

yourself out there and meet

33:56

people and he was very

33:58

active there. I was pretty active there. I

34:00

really look back fondly on those days. They

34:02

seem innocent. You

34:05

know, like it's pre-Twitter, it's pre-Facebook

34:07

being more than just, here's what

34:09

I had for breakfast, and here's

34:12

pictures of my new family, you

34:14

know? Anyway, so that's

34:16

how I knew him. I

34:18

guess he really is writing this at

34:21

the beginning part of that period,

34:23

and I had thought he was

34:25

very young, and I don't

34:28

know, this doesn't read like a piece

34:30

by a young philosopher.

34:32

To really have something

34:34

interesting to say about

34:37

this foundational difference right now

34:39

in the way professional philosophy

34:41

is practiced doesn't seem

34:43

like something you could do if you

34:46

were just starting out, but

34:48

I actually don't know what his history

34:50

is. Well, so yeah, on his website,

34:52

it says that he got a PhD

34:54

in continental philosophy in 95, and

34:57

then a second PhD on the metaphysics of free will in 06.

35:00

So I think you're reading it right. Neil

35:02

Levy has the experience with both. Yeah,

35:05

that's interesting. Qualifies him, I think.

35:08

And yeah, I

35:10

think you're complimenting the article by

35:12

saying that, but if you're not, like I think that

35:14

that's exactly how it reads to me. Yeah, like it

35:17

has the wisdom of somebody who's worked in both of

35:19

these. This definitely has something

35:21

interesting to say about the

35:23

differences, and I think something maybe

35:26

especially interesting to say about the

35:28

way analytic philosophy operates. And

35:30

we'll talk about that too. So let me

35:33

just give a little background for

35:35

people who aren't philosophy

35:38

grads or majors or who don't

35:41

know the way professional philosophy

35:43

works. So you

35:46

quickly discover if you're

35:48

applying for grad programs in philosophy that

35:50

there are analytically oriented

35:53

departments and there

35:55

are continental oriented departments and

35:57

that while... A

36:00

few universities have a handful

36:02

of both. Most

36:05

of them lean very heavily in

36:07

one direction. And some, or a

36:10

lot actually, like my own at

36:12

Houston, are just analytic.

36:15

And some are just continental.

36:17

And the ones you associate

36:19

with just continental, or at

36:21

least heavily continental, are like

36:23

Vanderbilt, Emory, BU, at least

36:26

in my memory, although I think that's changed a

36:28

little bit, Boston University. And

36:31

then the analytic ones are

36:33

like Rutgers, and Michigan, and

36:35

Harvard, and MIT. So

36:38

like, paradigmatically, you have these two

36:41

different kinds of departments. The

36:43

ones that are focused on continental philosophy,

36:45

and the ones that are focused on

36:47

analytic philosophy. I went to a

36:50

place that was only analytic philosophy. There

36:52

is no continental philosopher there. And

36:55

as you get raised in this tradition,

36:58

at least if you're being raised in

37:00

an analytic department, you feel like, okay,

37:02

this is the one that's kind of

37:05

co-extensive with science. And

37:07

then there are these freaks

37:09

over in the continental side,

37:12

like Gerida, and Foucault, and

37:14

Heidegger, who write in extremely

37:16

obscure prose, very German,

37:19

very French, in terms of

37:22

the style of what they're doing.

37:24

And they're just kind of putting

37:26

out gibberish, and getting laid, to

37:28

be fair, but it's still

37:30

mostly gibberish. And we're doing precise,

37:33

rigorous thinking. We're

37:35

actually using logic and reason, all the stuff

37:38

that you love. And you don't really know,

37:40

because you're never exposed. I never read Foucault,

37:42

I never read Derrida, I never

37:44

read Heidegger, I never read Husserl. You

37:48

would present me snippets of their work,

37:50

and yeah, it did seem like godly-gook.

37:53

But certainly the trajectory of my

37:55

career has taken me

37:58

more towards continental philosophy. and

38:00

away from the analytic approach as

38:02

thinking that that approach is fruitful.

38:05

But one thing that I've never

38:07

really thought about is

38:09

how to make a real kind

38:12

of concrete distinction between these two

38:14

approaches, these two schools, beyond

38:16

like the cliches and stereotypes

38:18

that I've been offering. And

38:22

that's what Neil Levy tries to do in

38:25

this paper. And not only that, he tries

38:27

to come up with a kind of explanation

38:29

for why these differences in the

38:31

two approaches continues, why it exists.

38:34

And you were the one who I think put it in

38:36

the slack. So yeah, what made you want to talk about

38:38

this? Yeah, I, you

38:40

know, of course I wasn't a philosophy grad

38:43

student. And the

38:45

way that I came to even realize

38:47

that this distinction existed, I think was

38:49

just purely by accident because as somebody

38:52

who was doing a psychology major, but

38:54

nonetheless was interested in philosophy, you know,

38:56

what philosophy means, what you think philosophy

38:58

is turns out to probably be something

39:00

that continental philosophers are interested in and that

39:03

analytic philosophers aren't. So as

39:05

somebody who is just like, okay, I

39:07

like philosophy, let me start reading some

39:09

philosophy. It started with psychology professor who

39:11

got me into reading existential stuff. And

39:14

you know, I never read Heidegger, like

39:16

I never read, you know, that hardcore

39:19

German stuff because it was inscrutable to

39:21

me. But that's clearly,

39:23

like to me it was clearly linked. There was

39:25

like a short step away from

39:27

going to Kierkegaard to going to Heidegger, right?

39:29

So like I had a professor who loved

39:31

Heidegger. And

39:34

so then it was weird that I

39:36

was just never exposed to really the,

39:38

like I should say I never read

39:40

stuff in the analytic tradition because again,

39:42

I was not told that this was

39:44

stuff I should read until I got

39:46

to graduate school and I started taking

39:48

courses in the philosophy department

39:50

at Yale because I was interested

39:52

in just learning more about moral stuff because

39:54

I want to do moral psychology. And there all

39:56

of a sudden I find myself in

39:58

these classes where it's It's these

40:01

puzzle cases and this here's premise one

40:03

premise two and yeah Just as you

40:05

would predict my brain gravitated

40:07

toward that stuff Frege each problem

40:09

as a like Objection to

40:11

non-cognitive exactly. Yeah. Yeah, like okay, but

40:14

like this is another thing like

40:16

how would you ever know? unless

40:18

you're a philosophy student probably In

40:21

grad school or maybe a serious major that there

40:23

is like this distinction between Metaethics

40:25

and normative ethics and that these

40:29

are all these these Professionals like terms of

40:31

art that I had no idea and

40:33

even then I think it only At

40:36

some point dawned on me when somebody said oh

40:39

this continental philosophy that oh there was a

40:41

term for me It was vibes like I

40:43

knew there were different vibes To

40:46

reading Kierkegaard and there was to reading

40:48

whatever More or something and there's

40:50

where I think that I caught up with you

40:52

that what I learned were cliches and stereotypes and and

40:55

Learned that there was a good kind of

40:58

philosophy and there was the sloppy kind and

41:00

the sloppy kind was continental And yeah, I

41:02

associated it with French guys

41:04

and black turtleneck smoking cigarettes or weird

41:07

German idealists You

41:12

bringing up Kierkegaard is interesting and maybe

41:15

just before we get into Levi's Argument

41:18

or his way of trying to

41:20

explain the difference I

41:23

think one of the things that

41:25

he doesn't address is the kind

41:27

of 19th-century

41:30

crossover philosophers. Yeah

41:32

Kierkegaard maybe is More

41:35

on the continental side or at least

41:38

more on the like analytic philosophers are

41:40

going to ignore you side

41:43

and probably with the continentals in that

41:46

he's very much like a proto existentialist

41:48

but Nietzsche and Maybe

41:50

a lesser extent Schopenhauer and certainly

41:52

Hegel very much are in this

41:54

kind of middle

41:56

ground where both analytic

41:59

flaws for and continental philosophers

42:01

can kind of claim this person

42:04

and includes them in their work,

42:06

you know, like in the debate.

42:09

Now that might be more recent in

42:12

analytic philosophy with someone like Nietzsche than

42:14

it was in the middle of last

42:16

century, you know,

42:18

the heyday of a certain kind

42:20

of very narrowly defined analytic philosophy.

42:22

But these people who scorn

42:26

continental philosophy, they

42:29

don't mean they scorn Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer,

42:31

Nietzsche. The contempt

42:33

that they have is for like the

42:35

people they think are charlatans like Derrida.

42:37

Right, Derrida is a good example. Yeah,

42:39

and Foucault, and then there are people

42:42

like Deleuze who would just think, okay,

42:44

like, I don't know, maybe there's something

42:46

interesting here, but I can't make heads

42:48

or tails of it, you know? And

42:50

then Husserl is, I think, Husserl

42:54

is where the split

42:56

is sometimes said to

42:58

take place, where the followers

43:00

of Husserl go to

43:03

continental philosopher, the most prominent

43:05

one being Heidegger, but Husserl

43:08

and Frege, like the arch-analytic

43:10

philosophy supervillain. You mean

43:12

Frege the superhero? No,

43:15

I don't. And also

43:17

being very loyal to my dad, who hated

43:19

Frege. I do. Even

43:22

though he, my dad was very much an

43:24

analytic philosopher in spirit and letter. But

43:27

anyway, so, like Husserl and Frege

43:29

didn't consider themselves doing different things,

43:31

right? Like they used to just

43:34

correspond and like, right, and like comment

43:36

on each other's work, but once you

43:38

get past them, it's like, okay, here's

43:40

Bertrand Russell, and here's logical

43:42

positivists, and here's, you know, this

43:44

one way of approaching philosophy that's

43:47

very much modeled after the sciences,

43:49

and then there's Heidegger and Sartre,

43:52

and these other people

43:54

who are just writing literary criticism

43:56

and nonsense. Yeah, which includes people

43:58

who, are doing like

44:01

psycho-analytic stuff. That's right. That got

44:03

wrapped into it. Very much

44:05

like into the continental tradition. Yep,

44:07

and you know, for our listeners

44:09

who might be Patreon supporters who

44:11

are currently voting on a topic,

44:13

that part of my introduction to

44:15

all of that tradition really was

44:17

from the denial of death that

44:20

tries to tie together existentialism, including

44:22

Kierkegaard, and Freud, and

44:26

you know, and empirical psychology, well,

44:28

somewhat, into this package, so

44:30

that is, I learned later,

44:32

I was reading a guess, continent-style

44:34

philosophy. Wait, so you've read The

44:36

Denial of Death? Oh yeah, yeah.

44:38

Oh, I didn't know that. So

44:41

I'm really getting fucked. But

44:44

I read it in college. Like, yeah, okay.

44:47

Okay, okay. I took a class where we read

44:49

it as a text for the class.

44:51

Oh, cool. It was fun, you know,

44:53

I'm curious to see where did I go back whether

44:55

I'll think it's all like hogwash, because I, maybe.

44:58

Because you're so analytically trained now.

45:00

Exactly, yeah, no. Now

45:02

I'm doing. So people

45:04

who do history of philosophy, or

45:06

people in classics departments who are

45:09

trained as philosophers, are those

45:11

people, does it cut either way? Like, are

45:13

those people doing history of philosophy one

45:15

or the other? So yeah, just to add

45:18

a little context to this question, continental

45:21

philosophers typically invoke

45:24

history and embed their positions

45:26

within a history

45:29

of the tradition that they're writing in. Whereas,

45:31

you know, like there are plenty of exceptions

45:33

to this, but analytic philosophers are like, there's

45:36

no point in going

45:38

back to Ptolemaic astronomy.

45:41

Like, we've made progress and

45:43

that stuff is only interesting

45:45

sociologically. You know, maybe,

45:47

oh, here's some Aristotle stuff that might

45:50

still be relevant today, but I'm gonna

45:52

talk about it not in the context

45:54

of the historical circumstances that it emerged,

45:56

but rather to the extent that it

45:58

can help my argument. Is

46:00

the argument true that Aristotle made in these

46:02

two pages true or not? Yeah, and in

46:05

that way, it's a very impoverished, I think,

46:07

way of approaching philosophy. I think the continental

46:09

philosophers, it can be a

46:11

little tedious sometimes to go through a whole

46:13

history, but I think they're right to recognize

46:17

that historical context matters

46:20

when you're discussing certain kinds of

46:22

positions and certain ideas. So

46:25

your question then presumes that

46:27

people who study history would

46:29

be continentally oriented, and

46:31

they're not. So the real

46:34

question is whether they're analytic

46:36

philosophers or they're their own

46:38

special weird— Right, good historians.

46:40

Yeah, and I think it's that. That's

46:43

my understanding. Okay, so let's

46:45

go into Levy's argument here. I

46:49

want to just give him credit for even

46:52

trying, because I just thought, okay,

46:54

well, the answer is just like there's two traditions.

46:56

It's like West Coast, hip-hop, and East Coast hip-hop.

46:58

I don't know. It's just like, is there really

47:00

a need to answer this? And

47:03

as he was writing, I got convinced that,

47:05

no, there is something

47:07

deeper to this. Totally. Yeah.

47:10

And he says, I'm not going to

47:12

try to find necessary and sufficient conditions.

47:14

I get that this is family resemblance.

47:16

Yes, there are some people even today

47:18

like Charles Taylor and Alistair McIntyre who

47:20

kind of have one foot in both

47:22

camps. But that said,

47:24

I think we can come up with

47:26

some way of describing the difference and

47:30

some explanation for

47:32

why that difference has

47:35

persisted until today and what the causes

47:37

of that are. He

47:39

goes through a couple of

47:41

different possible ways of

47:44

distinguishing them. One of

47:46

them is that anti-scientism

47:48

characterizes continental thought.

47:51

The continental thinkers have often objected

47:53

to the hegemony of science in

47:55

modern culture, insisting that it

47:58

represents neither the only kind of knowledge

48:00

nor even the most basic

48:02

kind. I think that's

48:05

true. A lot of the

48:07

kind of paradigmatic continental philosophers

48:09

believe that what they're

48:11

doing is prior to science.

48:14

You know, they're investigating deeper,

48:17

more fundamental epistemological and

48:20

ontological questions and

48:22

there's nothing that science can do that

48:25

will, I don't know, undermine

48:27

their approach because science is

48:29

just already one level up

48:32

from what they're doing. You're

48:34

already accepting a set of

48:36

basic epistemological or

48:39

ontological assumptions when you do

48:41

science. That sounds right to me.

48:43

Again, like throughout I will have

48:45

to like rely on what you say about

48:47

a lot of this because I wasn't

48:49

trained in either of them but I

48:51

do, that does sound right. I

48:53

don't know that I would have characterized

48:56

it as deeper but it's definitely contextual,

48:58

like all knowledge is contextual and science,

49:00

the scientific way of understanding the world

49:02

is merely one way of many

49:04

ways to understand the world. But

49:07

it's not just that, it is that,

49:09

but it's not just that. It's also

49:11

that the continental philosopher thinks they are

49:14

examining subjective experience. Like

49:16

the thing that you even

49:19

need before you could even

49:21

contemplate doing science or understanding

49:23

what science was. They really

49:25

think they're investigating like consciousness

49:27

and being and these

49:29

things that, I don't know if they

49:31

need to be settled before you do

49:33

science but you're certainly

49:35

already accepting certain assumptions about

49:38

those questions once you start

49:40

to do science. Yeah,

49:42

I mean hence the phenomenological. Yeah, exactly.

49:45

That's why I think phenomenology is

49:48

that's where you start to have

49:50

a more clearly defined difference between

49:52

the two. As an aside by

49:54

the way, I remember being confused

49:56

that some continental philosophers were like

49:58

Kantians in the same way that some

50:00

analytic philosophers were Kantians. I'm like, so which is he? But

50:03

I guess it's just Kant has such an

50:05

influence. It gets very confusing when it's like Kant

50:07

and Hegel because the

50:10

questions they're addressing are more

50:13

like the questions that analytic

50:15

philosophers address. And I think actually

50:17

this is where Neil Levy's

50:19

explanation of this difference or his

50:22

characterization of this difference is actually

50:24

pretty helpful. My suggestion is this,

50:26

analytic philosophy has successfully modeled

50:28

itself on the physical sciences. Work

50:31

in it is thus guided by paradigms,

50:33

the function in the way that

50:36

Thomas Kuhn sketches and the discipline

50:38

is reproduced in something akin to

50:40

the way in which sciences are

50:42

reproduced. Continental philosophy has had a

50:45

quite different approach to a subject

50:47

matter, a quite different model of

50:49

what philosophy is, which guides its

50:51

characteristics, concerns, and shapes its methods.

50:54

And this is this analogy that

50:56

I found actually really enlightening and

50:58

insightful. The idea is that in

51:00

analytic philosophy, there is a

51:02

paradigm that has been

51:04

established and it was established

51:06

according to Levy by Frege

51:09

and Russell. And

51:11

it is this very logical,

51:13

analytical, scientifically informed,

51:16

and scientifically modeled

51:18

approach. Continental philosophy

51:20

hasn't recognized any kind

51:22

of paradigm. And so

51:24

because analytic philosophers have, they

51:26

think this is the way

51:29

of doing philosophy, whether it's

51:31

through conceptual analysis or whether

51:33

it's through some broader kind

51:35

of naturalized epistemology that it's

51:38

still going to be, I am presenting

51:40

you an argument to lead to a

51:42

sound conclusion. And you can

51:44

get, according to Levy, progress through

51:46

that along the lines. And I

51:48

have questions about this, but you

51:50

can get results and progress when

51:53

you do normal philosophy,

51:55

puzzle cases, and these counter

51:58

examples to puzzle cases. and

52:00

these new theories that can handle

52:03

those counter examples, you can kind

52:05

of operate a whole research program

52:08

because the basic

52:10

assumptions of the foundation

52:13

of what you're doing are accepted and

52:15

shared. And it's funny because I think

52:17

what he's saying seems to fall out

52:20

from what I already believed about these

52:22

two in

52:24

a way that again, I just never been reflective

52:26

of it. When Levi says, look,

52:28

if we think about this as in

52:31

this communion framework, it totally makes

52:33

sense that all of the things that we

52:35

think and have been told that characterize analytic

52:38

philosophy really do in

52:40

the sense that they are background

52:42

assumptions that have been agreed upon.

52:44

And because of that, you can

52:46

do kind of a historical, a

52:48

contextual sort of systematic work

52:50

that builds on each other because people just

52:52

accept that this is the method, right? This

52:55

is the primary method by which we're gonna

52:57

achieve truth. And so I

52:59

can take your article, this

53:02

is another thing that I found fascinating.

53:04

He says that because of this, analytic

53:06

philosophers can primarily make their contributions in

53:08

journal articles whereas continental philosophers have to

53:10

write books. That was very- Totally true.

53:12

You can go your whole career as

53:14

an analytic philosopher and only write journal

53:16

articles. And even in Gettier's case, only

53:19

write one. Only write three

53:21

page one. Right, and a lot

53:23

of analytic philosophy books really

53:26

a collection of articles or

53:28

lectures or whatever. Obviously a lot

53:30

of exceptions, some of the

53:32

most famous work in analytic philosophy

53:35

is in book form, the theory of

53:37

justice, word and object. This

53:40

is not gonna be an exhaustive way of

53:42

describing this. There are exceptions. So

53:44

yeah, I loved it. I love it

53:46

to think of continental philosophy as pre-pareidigmatic.

53:49

And because of that, when you

53:51

have a pre-pareidigmatic approach, you

53:54

can get a lot more

53:56

originality and novelty in arguments

53:59

and you- can get

54:01

people who work on bigger picture stuff

54:03

that are completely outside of the paradigm

54:05

of the analytic philosophical tradition,

54:08

stuff that doesn't neatly fit into

54:10

any of the problem space that

54:12

analytic philosophy has laid out for

54:14

itself, and stuff that

54:16

might seem from somebody within analytic

54:19

philosophy to de-gobbled de-gook. But

54:21

I think in part because you really have to work

54:24

hard. You have to work hard to try to understand

54:26

Heidegger and what he's saying. Yeah,

54:28

there's a couple ironies in

54:30

this characterization. Levi says,

54:32

number one, like you said, that this allows

54:34

continental philosophers to actually work on the stuff

54:36

that people associate with philosophy, like really big

54:39

questions about the meaning of life and our

54:41

place in the universe and all of that.

54:44

And he says, like, analytic

54:46

philosophy writing is just boring

54:48

and dry, whereas, like, continental

54:50

writing is fun and, you

54:53

know, more accessible. At some

54:56

point, yeah, that's more accessible. And

54:58

it's like, you know, this part is

55:00

the, you know, certainly the

55:02

best of continental philosophy, or at

55:04

least the parts that I've been

55:06

able to connect with are accessible.

55:08

But like, if there's one thing

55:10

that, like, at least according to

55:13

the stereotypes, they're not as accessible,

55:15

they're jargon filled, and not technical

55:17

jargon, like, that it feels like

55:19

you could try to figure it out if

55:22

you cared to. And maybe

55:24

this is just my prejudice talking,

55:26

but I thought that was kind of

55:28

interesting that, you know, you don't get

55:30

from Levi in

55:32

this, the kind of caricature of

55:34

continental philosophy as being actually the,

55:37

quite the opposite of accessible, just

55:39

obscure even to people who are

55:41

giving good faith efforts to trying

55:43

to figure out what's going on.

55:45

Yeah, no, I have the same

55:47

note about the accessible part. And

55:50

I think Bernard Williams' quote says

55:52

this, where he says that

55:54

one of the goals he thinks of analytic

55:56

philosophy or one of the characteristics is that

55:58

it uses moderately plain. in speech. Yeah,

56:02

as somebody who has really

56:04

wanted to connect with continental

56:06

philosophy because I've become so

56:08

skeptical of the paradigm that

56:10

analytic philosophy is often working

56:12

with that it's hard to

56:14

engage. I have found it very

56:16

hard to access what it is that

56:21

they're talking about, even though I feel in

56:23

my soul, like this is going to be,

56:25

like if I can get, if I can

56:28

grok this, as you would say, I

56:30

will agree with it or at the

56:33

very least it will inspire me to

56:35

understand something about this problem that I'm

56:37

thinking about. So I

56:40

do think there's some jargon in

56:42

continental philosophy. If we read Derrida

56:44

or Deleuze, it's not normal science

56:46

though, but a, I don't know,

56:50

a set of terms and a set of

56:53

ideas that you need to have down

56:55

if you're going to figure out what's going on

56:59

in some of that work. Right, there

57:01

is a comfort that comes from

57:04

this paradigmatic nature of analytic philosophy

57:06

where I can easily

57:08

turn to a philosopher in analytic

57:10

tradition and ask them to explain

57:13

what is meant by internalism in moral

57:16

philosophy and they can just tell me. Like,

57:18

well, it's very clear what it

57:21

means. I think the problem

57:23

with analytic philosophy in that

57:25

respect is really

57:27

the problem with normal science when

57:30

they reach a certain point. It

57:33

is very comforting and it's nice

57:35

and people can understand each other,

57:38

but when you start to have, as

57:40

I think it is easy to have,

57:42

real doubts about the paradigm you're working

57:45

within, then analytic philosophy

57:47

has a hard time dealing with

57:49

that, right? This is

57:51

one of the characteristics of

57:53

normal science which

57:55

is that when you start digging

57:58

too deep into the foundation, foundational

58:00

assumptions of their paradigm, the

58:03

normal science is very

58:05

ill-equipped to address that and often

58:07

will have a lot of

58:10

obstacles or barriers in the way

58:13

of doing that. And they won't all be obvious. It's

58:15

not like you're gonna be kicked out

58:17

of your university if you start asking

58:20

these questions. It'll just be much

58:22

harder for people to figure out

58:24

a way of launching

58:26

these objections within that paradigm

58:29

because the paradigm is

58:31

in part defined by already

58:33

accepting the assumptions that you're

58:35

questioning. And the methodology

58:37

is built around those assumptions. So

58:39

it's very hard within that methodology

58:42

to raise some of these questions.

58:44

We don't have a good way

58:46

of evaluating the effectiveness

58:48

of those critiques. And we especially

58:51

don't have a good way of

58:53

evaluating alternative approaches

58:55

to the paradigm. I mean,

58:58

but yeah, I guess by definition. Yeah, so

59:00

here's the part that I'm sure, as

59:03

I was reading it, I was sure you were gonna disagree with,

59:06

which is, he says that what

59:08

he worries about is that maybe

59:11

it's the case that analytic philosophy actually just

59:13

does better with novel ideas because

59:15

when a novel idea does get proposed, it

59:19

pops out more clearly. Even though it might take

59:21

time, it might take effort to break through

59:23

the paradigm. He says,

59:25

continental philosophy, maybe they're just basking in so

59:27

much novelty that it's just hard to actually

59:29

tell when something, is that how you understand

59:31

his concern? I

59:34

mean, and it might be right. Like again, I'm

59:36

like not familiar enough with continental

59:38

philosophy to know whether or not

59:40

that's a good critique. I

59:43

mean, honestly, my disagreements with the piece are

59:46

more that he thinks analytic philosophy can

59:49

be said to make progress in the

59:51

way that, like

59:53

paradigmatic sciences, normal science, can

59:55

say to make progress. he

1:00:00

says about continental philosophy, it's hard for me

1:00:02

to judge because I'm just not familiar

1:00:05

enough with it. Okay, let's talk about the progress

1:00:07

thing because I believe it

1:00:09

or not had a similar concern about this, which

1:00:11

is I know I buy that

1:00:13

analytic philosophy has modeled itself on natural science

1:00:15

and I buy that there are these paradigms,

1:00:18

I buy that Russell and Frig and all

1:00:20

those people who started this whole

1:00:22

approach laid the foundation. Is

1:00:26

it progress or is it the illusion

1:00:28

of progress or is it even an

1:00:30

illusion of progress because it's a very

1:00:32

different thing to say as scientists say

1:00:35

we know more now

1:00:37

than we did before, whereas philosophers might

1:00:39

say well by progress we just

1:00:41

mean we clarified the

1:00:44

questions or whatever. Yeah, that's actually

1:00:46

like I think a key question

1:00:48

and I think so

1:00:51

when it comes to real

1:00:53

logical analysis like hardcore logic

1:00:56

that was done in the beginning and

1:00:58

middle of the 20th century, they

1:01:01

got results. They weren't just

1:01:03

bouncing ideas back and forth

1:01:06

in a bankrupt pseudo problem kind of

1:01:08

way they were. I don't understand

1:01:10

them, I'm not sure I would like

1:01:12

what the value of that progress is,

1:01:15

but it is

1:01:17

actual results. You have

1:01:19

proofs and these proofs sometimes

1:01:21

can have pretty serious

1:01:24

implications for other fields

1:01:27

and so I think it's fair

1:01:29

to say that they have progress.

1:01:31

When it comes to something like

1:01:33

meta-epics, when it comes to something

1:01:35

like even justice, I don't see

1:01:37

how you can say

1:01:40

that we've made progress in a

1:01:42

non-question begging way. You can say

1:01:44

you've made progress politically, you can

1:01:47

say the Civil Rights Act

1:01:49

was progress, but that has nothing to do with

1:01:52

analytic philosophy progress. When

1:01:55

it comes to do we have

1:01:57

a better understanding of motivational internalism?

1:02:01

I'd like, but like, is

1:02:03

that progress or is that just, we've

1:02:07

been jerking ourselves off in new

1:02:09

and different ways, but we're not

1:02:11

actually shedding light on the

1:02:13

world and the human experience. I don't

1:02:15

know, if you think it's a pseudo

1:02:17

problem, like the concept of knowledge or

1:02:19

something like that, then there's no

1:02:21

way to say that that's progress. It's

1:02:23

just progress in wasting people's time. Right,

1:02:26

so a couple things. One,

1:02:28

I totally agree with you

1:02:30

about the progress that was made by

1:02:33

those early guys, but I feel, I'm

1:02:35

pretty sure that they hit a wall, that

1:02:38

they themselves, Russell himself was like, fuck,

1:02:40

Kurt Girdle comes along and he's, fucks

1:02:42

me, and

1:02:44

he's right, right? Or Wittgenstein comes along

1:02:46

and he fucks everybody and he's right

1:02:48

or whatever, you know? And so then

1:02:51

the remainder of analytic philosophy that was

1:02:53

sort of built on that methodology has

1:02:55

adopted the form of

1:02:57

those methods without really,

1:03:00

I'm sort of speaking out of my ass,

1:03:02

so bear with me, but it has adopted

1:03:04

the form of that early work, and

1:03:07

you can see that in the way

1:03:09

that they write their papers often, but

1:03:12

it's not come to terms with the

1:03:15

sort of bankruptcy of that project as the

1:03:18

authors of that project themselves admitted. That's

1:03:20

true. The other thing I was gonna say is, when

1:03:23

I think about progress, and here's where I

1:03:25

wanna ask you directly about, well, but like,

1:03:28

gun to your head, is the work

1:03:30

on free will from 50 years ago, can

1:03:34

you say that the work on

1:03:36

free will now hasn't made

1:03:38

something that you would call progress? And

1:03:41

if that progress might just be that we're

1:03:43

more precise in laying out the problem

1:03:46

space? Yeah, no, that's a good

1:03:48

question, I don't know. So here's

1:03:50

the thing, this is where like,

1:03:53

my whole anti-analytic philosophy stance,

1:03:55

which is only probably like

1:03:57

10%. bench

1:04:00

stick and something that I've really

1:04:03

had for a long time. I've

1:04:05

had, like, I've been skeptical of

1:04:07

certainly a lot of the philosophical

1:04:09

problems that are dominant within analytic

1:04:11

philosophy, but I think in the

1:04:13

free will debate is so much

1:04:15

better. I don't know

1:04:17

about now, but I think it was

1:04:19

so much better starting from the seventies

1:04:22

to the early two thousands. And it

1:04:24

really was at any point in the

1:04:26

history of philosophers talking about this. I

1:04:30

do think like you have someone like strawson

1:04:32

come along and say something that nobody has

1:04:34

ever said about the free will moral responsibility

1:04:36

debate, including like the,

1:04:38

you know, the existentialists, including

1:04:42

my heroes like Betero

1:04:44

and you know, Spinoza on it, like

1:04:48

really came up with something that was

1:04:50

truly original that I think is actually

1:04:52

mostly right. It's very interestingly unanalytic paper.

1:04:56

And that it doesn't lay out arguments in a precise way

1:04:59

and nobody can totally agree

1:05:01

upon what he was actually saying, but it's

1:05:03

a dominant piece within analytic philosophy.

1:05:07

It's not a continental piece. It's a work

1:05:09

of analytic philosophy and it's been treated that

1:05:11

way. And I think a lot of the

1:05:13

literature on it is misguided or misunderstands what

1:05:17

strawson was getting at, but a lot of the literature is

1:05:19

really good. You know, you

1:05:21

have the Gary Watson paper with the very first book, the

1:05:26

Robert Harris paper. That's a great

1:05:28

paper that adds its own little

1:05:31

spin. And so there is room,

1:05:34

you know, it's funny to

1:05:36

say make progress, like, yeah,

1:05:38

to understand the problem of

1:05:40

freedom and responsibility. If

1:05:43

that's the goal, then

1:05:45

we understand it better. I think

1:05:47

because of the way analytic philosophers

1:05:50

have approached it. And

1:05:52

I'm sure like Bergson also would give us a lot

1:05:54

to think about if I could immerse.

1:06:00

myself in his

1:06:02

view of freedom, but the free will

1:06:05

and moral responsibility debate for all my

1:06:07

frustrations with the theorizing

1:06:09

and the overly systematic

1:06:11

approach and the almost willful

1:06:13

misunderstandings of what Strassen was

1:06:15

trying to tell everybody, that

1:06:18

whole literature is at

1:06:20

the center of the analytic philosophy

1:06:23

debate on free will and moral responsibility. I

1:06:26

think, you know, I certainly feel

1:06:28

like my understanding of that problem is much

1:06:30

richer because of that literature. Right.

1:06:32

And that way of putting it, the understanding of

1:06:35

the problem, I guess, must

1:06:37

be the kind of progress that Levy

1:06:39

must be talking about or that analytic

1:06:41

philosophers are aiming to achieve, right? Sometimes,

1:06:43

I think. Yeah. Sometimes I

1:06:45

think they don't conceive of themselves that way.

1:06:47

They're like, oh, I just proved moral realism

1:06:49

is true. Right. Because it's

1:06:51

interesting. When I hear you talk about

1:06:54

your annoyance with the systematicity and all

1:06:56

the other things, the trappings of analytic

1:06:58

philosophy, I guess now I'm

1:07:00

realizing sometimes it's not clear whether you think,

1:07:03

given what you just said about the free will problem, it

1:07:05

seems as if those methods did yield something

1:07:07

valuable and interesting. So

1:07:10

it's hard to tease apart what you

1:07:12

might think are just dumb problems to

1:07:14

begin with. Right. Like maybe

1:07:16

we do know a lot more about how people use the

1:07:18

term knowledge, but what did we need to? Yeah.

1:07:21

I think that's right. I think there's two

1:07:23

different issues with analytic philosophy. Sometimes it's just

1:07:26

they're working on a pseudo problem. Sometimes

1:07:29

it's that they're working on a potentially

1:07:31

really interesting problem, but in a overly

1:07:33

dry or overly systematic way, which is,

1:07:36

I think, often my problem,

1:07:38

even with the free will and moral

1:07:40

responsibility debate, this is where I'm

1:07:42

very torn. I think there are

1:07:44

resources within analytic philosophy to express

1:07:47

that kind of frustration that

1:07:49

I have. Maybe it's hard, but

1:07:51

it's through doing that that I

1:07:53

feel like I understand the issue better.

1:07:55

I always go back to this. I

1:07:58

remember I asked Susan Wolf. who

1:08:00

is, I think, a really good example

1:08:02

of both an accessible analytic philosopher and

1:08:04

one who typically writes on

1:08:07

a lot of the big questions. I

1:08:09

asked her, do you think we

1:08:12

theorize too much in philosophy? Don't

1:08:14

you think that kind of overly

1:08:16

theoretical approach is misguided? And she said, no,

1:08:19

I don't think it's a problem that we

1:08:21

come up with theories. I think the problem

1:08:23

is thinking that your theories are true. And

1:08:27

so what I take from that

1:08:29

is it's not

1:08:31

the theorizing that the problem, if you

1:08:34

understand it in a certain way,

1:08:36

and that way is theories

1:08:38

are a way of exploring the problem

1:08:40

and trying to more clearly define the

1:08:42

problem and understand the problem and understand

1:08:44

the questions and enrich the

1:08:46

questions. They can't be solved,

1:08:48

though. Like the puzzle

1:08:51

solving approach of analytic philosophy

1:08:54

sometimes presumes that you're going to get

1:08:56

at the truth. And that's not

1:08:58

something that philosophy can do

1:09:00

well. But the theorizing

1:09:02

itself, as long as it doesn't

1:09:05

have that pretense, can be pretty

1:09:07

useful and illuminating.

1:09:09

Yeah, that's why I think we like Nagel's

1:09:12

Mortal Questions essays so much.

1:09:15

It's really a case of doing philosophy in

1:09:18

a way where it means very literally just

1:09:20

asking the questions and not

1:09:22

presuming to have an answer that he arrived

1:09:24

at through those methods. It's

1:09:27

also interestingly not that

1:09:29

analytical. I mean, Tom Nagel

1:09:31

is so obviously an analytic

1:09:33

philosopher. You know what he's not doing is

1:09:36

operating within normal science. He's

1:09:40

starting from scratch. In

1:09:42

that way, it could be a

1:09:44

lot more continental in that he's

1:09:46

building from the ground up there.

1:09:49

He's talking about the absurd. He may reference

1:09:52

Camus. He may reference

1:09:54

a couple other people. But really, he's just writing

1:09:56

about the problem, not from

1:09:59

an established parrot. Yeah, but

1:10:01

I do get the sense that having

1:10:03

come from the established paradigm makes him

1:10:06

clearer. I agree. One

1:10:08

thing we haven't really talked about is the

1:10:10

comparison that Levi makes between continental

1:10:13

philosophy and just art, which is

1:10:15

another interesting one. Yeah,

1:10:17

again, it's like I think

1:10:19

it's certainly continental philosophers are

1:10:21

more interested in art and

1:10:23

incorporate art and literature and

1:10:25

film into their work

1:10:28

in ways that analytic philosophers don't.

1:10:30

I think analytic philosophers can be

1:10:32

Philistines about art and continental philosophers

1:10:34

at least actually really engage with

1:10:37

the literature. It's just that sometimes

1:10:39

again, it can be fruitful and

1:10:41

sometimes it can be really

1:10:43

obscure and actually very

1:10:46

theoretical. It's out

1:10:48

of continental philosophy that a

1:10:51

lot of the post-structuralist approaches

1:10:53

that are actually pretty reductive

1:10:55

of art, either reductive politically

1:10:57

or reductive according to some

1:11:00

new theory that they're working

1:11:02

with for interpretation. So

1:11:05

it's complicated, whereas then I feel like

1:11:07

the analytic philosophers are at least using

1:11:09

them as an example and maybe they

1:11:11

oversimplify it and maybe they're just treating

1:11:14

it as a thought experiment, but

1:11:16

at least they're not trying to drain

1:11:18

it or explain it in the way

1:11:20

that sometimes the continental philosophers can try

1:11:23

to do. And maybe that's more literary

1:11:25

theory than continental philosophy, but there's a

1:11:27

lot of overlap between those two. Yeah,

1:11:30

for sure. Here's what maybe we could

1:11:32

close on this question. Do you

1:11:35

think that there is a similar

1:11:38

kind of distinction you could

1:11:40

make in psychology? And

1:11:42

I'll give you the reasons for

1:11:45

why I'm asking this question. So

1:11:47

on the one hand, you have

1:11:49

the social psychologists working within normal

1:11:52

psychology, you know, with your

1:11:54

methods and your hypothesis testing

1:11:56

and your metrics, your

1:11:59

forms of measurement. and all of

1:12:01

that, it operates according to those

1:12:03

rules. And then you

1:12:05

have parallel to this, you

1:12:08

have psychoanalysis, you have

1:12:10

Gestalt theory, you

1:12:12

have analytic

1:12:14

psychology, which is actually associated

1:12:17

with Jungian views, that

1:12:19

just seem more

1:12:22

offbeat, more Marxist adjacent in

1:12:27

the way that continental philosophy can kind of

1:12:29

be Marxist adjacent, and also

1:12:31

to interact with literature,

1:12:34

at least, to make

1:12:36

that more central to their

1:12:38

understanding of the human mind

1:12:40

than social psychologists do, which

1:12:42

is usually just reduced to

1:12:44

the opening line of a

1:12:46

social psychology article. It's like,

1:12:49

in West Side Story, Officer

1:12:51

Crunky says, you know. Crunky,

1:12:55

no, I think that's exactly right. So

1:12:57

much, Tamler, to the point that when you

1:13:00

were asking, I was struggling to see what

1:13:02

this might be, and then when you brought

1:13:04

up psychoanalytic stuff, I was like, oh, I

1:13:06

forgot that was psychology. And

1:13:09

there is something that I

1:13:12

think is super interesting that

1:13:14

happened in psychology, where that

1:13:17

huge divide kicked out

1:13:19

those kinds of analysis, like

1:13:21

everything that you might say was birthed

1:13:23

by psychoanalytic theory. It got kicked out

1:13:25

of psychology departments, in a

1:13:27

way that they found their home in

1:13:29

like whatever literary theory and all that

1:13:31

stuff, and to some extent in clinical

1:13:33

psychology. To a large extent, right? There's

1:13:35

a big psychoanalytic. Yeah, yeah, yeah, for

1:13:37

sure as a method of treatment, but

1:13:39

just to distinguish it between, I guess,

1:13:42

clinical science, which is the kind

1:13:45

of psychology that you would learn. If you

1:13:47

were to go to any university and take a

1:13:49

course in clinical psychology, you

1:13:51

would very much be within the paradigm

1:13:53

of psychological science. Social

1:13:56

psychology right now is so built on

1:13:59

the paradigm. paradigm that really came out of

1:14:01

cognitive psychology and all that stuff that

1:14:03

came from everything from psychophysics to perception

1:14:06

and all that stuff. So much so

1:14:08

that we call it social cognition nowadays.

1:14:10

And the other stuff just got squeezed

1:14:12

out. And this does, I

1:14:14

think, illustrate a point that I

1:14:16

was thinking about that Levy makes,

1:14:18

which I think can sociologically help

1:14:20

to explain why that happened. And

1:14:23

it's what he says about, and

1:14:25

I guess, borrowed from Kuhn, that

1:14:27

paradigmatic normal science is self-reproducing in

1:14:30

a way that the other stuff

1:14:32

really isn't. And both in analytic

1:14:34

philosophy and in psychology, you

1:14:36

can become a graduate student and just be

1:14:39

introduced to this specific problem and then use

1:14:41

all the methods to work on that problem.

1:14:43

So you know when you come in and

1:14:45

you start thinking about what you're going to

1:14:47

do for your dissertation, you kind of already

1:14:50

know what the problem space is and how

1:14:52

you might go about doing it in

1:14:54

a way that lends itself really nicely

1:14:56

to pumping out PhDs. Yeah, and punching

1:14:58

out articles. Yeah. In a way that's

1:15:01

like, I don't know, I guess in

1:15:03

continental philosophy, you learn how to make

1:15:05

contributions that way. But I suspect

1:15:07

that that's probably why analytic philosophy

1:15:10

took over philosophy so hardcore.

1:15:12

Not because it was yielding

1:15:14

more truth, but because it's

1:15:17

just like a reproduction machine in a way

1:15:19

that the other kind can't be. A hundred

1:15:21

percent, yes. Because it gives

1:15:23

people a way of like a set

1:15:25

of somewhat objective criteria like,

1:15:28

is this argument good? Like did

1:15:30

they provide enough evidence for this

1:15:32

premise? And I can evaluate

1:15:34

like the work of a psychologist on

1:15:37

a committee that doesn't do what I

1:15:39

do, but I can use my tools to

1:15:41

evaluate whether their work is good or not. Like it's

1:15:43

not too hard so long as I

1:15:45

understand some of their, you know, specific methods

1:15:47

or terms of art or whatever, I can say

1:15:49

whether it's good or bad in a way that I don't, you know. The

1:15:52

one way I thought it might

1:15:54

be disanalogous is that psychoanalytic theory

1:15:57

is itself a pretty well-defined

1:15:59

pair. and that

1:16:01

there are people who work in that

1:16:04

tradition who have kind of built on

1:16:06

Freud's ideas, maybe broke with him on

1:16:08

a couple of things, but carried it

1:16:11

forward, and there's a lot

1:16:13

of psychoanalytic approaches to politics

1:16:15

and art, and it does

1:16:18

feel like they are working with it

1:16:20

in the paradigm, even if it's not

1:16:23

at all the paradigm that scientists are

1:16:25

working with then. Yeah, I don't know

1:16:27

what the answer to that, the right

1:16:29

answer is, I was talking to Nicky

1:16:31

about this article, and she was saying

1:16:34

something about, it's wrong to think

1:16:36

that content philosophers aren't also working in a paradigm. And

1:16:39

in my defense of Levy, I was saying, well,

1:16:41

I think if you mean by paradigm

1:16:44

a bunch of widely shared assumptions and

1:16:46

methods, then no, but if

1:16:48

you just mean a knowledge

1:16:50

base, some

1:16:53

shared beliefs, then maybe, but

1:16:55

that's not, I think,

1:16:57

what Kuhn or Levy mean by paradigm. And

1:16:59

I think, Levy makes this

1:17:01

point that I also found really interesting,

1:17:04

where he says that this is why

1:17:06

continental philosophy talks more about individual authors.

1:17:09

So the currency is to talk about what

1:17:11

does Foucault think about this, not

1:17:13

what is the finding in this domain.

1:17:15

And I think psychoanalytic stuff is

1:17:18

somewhere in between where if

1:17:21

you say you're a psychoanalytic theorist, people might

1:17:23

wanna know right away, are

1:17:25

you a Freudian, are you a union, are

1:17:28

you this or that? Like it's more acolyte

1:17:30

kind of, let's extend, because

1:17:32

obviously not everybody can reinvent the wheel. But

1:17:36

they kind of will choose which school,

1:17:38

and by school it's really like this

1:17:40

person's work is central or not. Yeah,

1:17:42

yeah, yeah, Mark Hughes. Yeah, that's right.

1:17:44

Someone like that, yeah, yeah. No, that's

1:17:46

right, and that's very analogous

1:17:48

in that way to

1:17:51

continental philosophy. I remember a jarring time

1:17:53

where one of the only times I

1:17:55

gave a talk in an interdisciplinary place

1:17:57

where there were plenty of people from

1:17:59

the... continental tradition and from the

1:18:01

psychoanalytic tradition and even from like the kind

1:18:03

of anthropology That's more a humanity than it

1:18:05

is a science and

1:18:08

I gave my talk which was just very straightforwardly

1:18:11

Here's my study. Yeah, you know, here's my measures

1:18:13

and The questions

1:18:15

were like what do you think

1:18:17

a Foucaultian approach to this would be and I

1:18:19

was like I was so confused I was like,

1:18:21

can you tell me what he what he thought

1:18:23

about this? And then maybe I can tell you

1:18:26

what I would say I thought this was just

1:18:28

name-dropping Yeah, I

1:18:31

Went out in my fourth year I don't know why

1:18:33

I thought I could get a job in my after

1:18:35

my fourth year of PhD but I

1:18:38

did get an interview at the University of Denver

1:18:40

and That was

1:18:42

a very Continentially oriented

1:18:45

Department and I was just doing my

1:18:47

free will skepticism, you know my just

1:18:49

naive like There's

1:18:52

no free will it's all genetics

1:18:55

and environment and I'm

1:18:57

gonna do an error theory Of why you

1:18:59

believe there's free will they could like evolutionary

1:19:01

explanation for that I don't

1:19:04

know why they gave me an interview But

1:19:06

I do remember that exact question coming from

1:19:08

one of the committee members and he was

1:19:10

not being a dick He was just like

1:19:12

lose Said like,

1:19:14

you know You talk about Spinoza and

1:19:16

what's been those like have you read

1:19:19

to lose on Spinoza and his whole

1:19:21

announce? And and I just I had

1:19:23

never heard that name in

1:19:25

my whole life That was the first

1:19:27

time I had ever heard that like

1:19:29

the word dilute is spoken right But

1:19:31

that was considered to be a legitimate

1:19:34

question because I guess it you know

1:19:36

There are certain foundational figures even if

1:19:38

there's no paradigm that people have to

1:19:40

talk in the context of maybe that's

1:19:42

part of their historically Oriented approach. I

1:19:44

don't know. Yeah. Yeah. Well, do you

1:19:46

think this article was continental or analytic? It's

1:19:49

pretty analytic Here's where

1:19:51

you can tell that it's analytic this

1:19:53

essay will fall into two parts in

1:19:55

the first I shall examine some recent

1:19:57

attempts to characterize analytic and continental philosophy

1:20:00

hereafter AP and CP

1:20:02

respectively. That's not something

1:20:04

you would see in a continental piece.

1:20:06

I shall suggest that all

1:20:09

failed to state necessary and sufficient conditions

1:20:11

that could function as criteria with which

1:20:13

to count. Indeed there are no such

1:20:16

criteria or so I shall contend. Like

1:20:19

right there, that sentence. Indeed there are no

1:20:21

such criteria or so I shall contend. You

1:20:23

wouldn't find that in a continental. No, no,

1:20:26

it's true. Even you're right, the AP and

1:20:28

the CP, I was like, oh

1:20:30

okay. You can't be

1:20:32

bothered to write analytics so many times. It

1:20:35

is funny that you don't find that in a

1:20:37

continental. They just don't do that. You

1:20:39

don't just start

1:20:41

taking words away and putting letters in

1:20:43

their place. Right, the longer the word

1:20:45

the better. Exactly, that's

1:20:48

the German influence. Exactly.

1:20:52

All right, that's

1:20:54

the analytic continental tradition. I want

1:20:56

to be more into continental than

1:20:58

I am. Well, we

1:21:01

just need to pick a text,

1:21:03

I think. I agree, yeah. Gotta

1:21:05

dive into it. Well, Schopenhauer, Schopenhauer

1:21:08

is not gonna win, but I think we're gonna

1:21:10

get to Schopenhauer. That can be our little step.

1:21:13

One of the questions I have in

1:21:15

my notes is where do the pragmatists

1:21:18

fit in this? James and Dewey or

1:21:20

like Hurst or somebody. They

1:21:23

also seem like they have foots in both

1:21:25

camps. They're both styling

1:21:27

the kind of substance. For sure, because

1:21:29

the divide came later, I could see

1:21:32

both camps claiming some of them. And

1:21:34

so both camps ignore them. Like

1:21:36

the actual fact that both camps ignore

1:21:39

them. Social psychology

1:21:41

uses James' opening lines all the time.

1:21:43

Yeah, but not in philosophy, not that

1:21:45

much. All

1:21:48

right, well that's it from us on

1:21:51

philosophy and psychology, bonus. Join us

1:21:53

next time on Great Bad With...

1:21:55

Ahhh! He

1:22:00

didn't even need me either!

1:22:12

I've not known you were a good

1:22:14

man! A good man! I'm

1:22:21

so lazy! I

1:22:24

know I'm lazy! I'm a good man!

1:22:30

Anybody can have a date? You're

1:22:34

a very bad man! A

1:22:37

very good man, Justin. A very

1:22:39

bad woman.