 Welcome back to the Agora cafe for more coffee and philosophy Today, I'm happy to have joining us My friend and colleague Kelly Dean Jolly. He's professor of philosophy and Goodwin Philpott and Dow chair in religion here at Auburn University He has a PhD from University of Rochester Like Eric Mack who I interviewed in episode eight that they both studied with Lewis white Beck, although in different geological eras Kelly's the author of three strikingly different books the concept horse paradox and Vic and Stinean conceptual investigations Published formerly by ashgate, but now by Routledge a book of poetry stony lonesome from New Plains Press and Chuck real love in the spy life a book about the spy fight television show Chuck Which is available as a free download on his website Kelly Dean jolly.com and I'll have a link to that in the description in fact I'll have a link to all the stuff in the description. He's also the editor of in the anthology Vic and Stein key concepts Published formerly by Ackerman and now once again by the Aldervower and Routledge You mean there's the full disclosure. I also have a couple of pieces in that anthology one standalone and one Coauthored with Kelly He also has a blog and a podcast accessible from his Website the podcast is called the sound of thinking the blog is called quantum est in the rabus and on a which means How much in quantum physics is a name and there's Kelly's way of thinking a fight with our mutual colleague Eli Shaq You can believe that or not believe it as my kindergarten teacher mrs. Brzee is to say Kelly's a broad range of research interests across Historical and contemporary across analytic and continental Interest ranging from Jane Austen to JL Austin From Greek philosophy to Greek orthodox theology from film theory to the foundations of logic and I probably learned as much From Kelly is from anyone that I studied within grad school. So Hi Kelly, welcome to the Agora cafe. Well, it's great to be here So I was hoping that you would talk a little bit about your background growing up How you got interested in in philosophy start off with some of that stuff. Sure I guess I got interested in philosophy because when I was in junior high decided to move me out of my junior high classes and let me take classes in high school and I ended up While I was I guess in eighth grade Taking the senior creative writing class and I really loved that class and fell in love with writing and I really like the woman who taught it to whom I owe many deaths her name was space hour and The summer after that class I was so sort of energized by the class that I wrote a collection of 50 essays that summer And at the end of the summer I went back to school and went back to face hour and I had that Bunch of handwritten essays in my hand. I gave them to her She came back to school the next day with them vetted And with a copy of Plato's complete dialogues and she said this is what you should be reading and I read the first page of the lysis and I thought Hey, that's what I should be reading And I pretty much decided then and there the first friend I would do I would be a philosopher or though. I wasn't you know, perhaps entirely sure what that meant I just knew that those pages of the lysis Did something for me that I desperately wanted done but hadn't found in anything else before that and so I started reading that book and she supplied me with other things to read and And you know That's how I that's how I really got started. Um, I knew I wanted to do it I Ended up leaving high school early didn't finish. I went on to college on an early admissions program to the College of Wooster and they let me skip the introductory philosophy stuff and go right into the upper-level classes and I You know just kind of Never had any doubt that that's what I wanted to do, you know, that's what I wanted to to study and to to think about I've had You know doubts since then about exactly what I'm doing in it, but but I've never doubted that it was where I wanted to be You can see also a little bit about about where you're from where you grew up and I grew up in southern Ohio In a little town called Gallipolize City of the Gauls It's the second oldest city in Ohio Founded by a group of French who'd been swindled told that there was a place prepared for them The Ohio Valley When they got there there was no place prepared for them And so they ended up just basically kind of pulling their boats out of the water at the confluence of the Ohio and canola rivers and deciding Well, this is as good a place as any And so growing up in Gallipoli often does have bad results It doesn't seem like the best possible plan At any rate, that was the that was the place. So it was a very small Very small community the high school. I went to I think it's right behind me There were 27 people in my graduating class It was a rule Place this nearest City of any consequence was Huntington, West Virginia A city of which almost no one knows so calling it a city of consequence tells you something about where I really was Uh, just how isolated it was but that's where I grew up And you know your family was into uh bluegrass performance Yeah, I grew up in a family of musicians. My father was a school teacher. In fact His mother was a school teacher. I'm the fifth generation teacher in the family. So it's a long family business But he was though he was a school teacher. He was really a musician um and played music throughout my life Played As professionally as a bluegrass player can play At least back in those days in the 50s and 60s My brothers ended up becoming musicians too And so it was a house full of of music guitars and mandolins and singing So, uh, all right. So we've got you as far as as college You're taking upper level classes in college and then what's the Um, so I took upper level classes in college and though and though as I said, I never really questioned Whether I wanted to do philosophy. I did sometimes wonder what I was doing in it um And so that happened to me But that's a philosophical question. So you're You're still doing philosophy. Yeah, well, is there a sort of I say it's not clear. You can really get away from it um, but I I Actually began to think that There was something sort of artificial and stymying about studying philosophy in the academy Don't ask me why at 17. I thought I knew this Uh, but that's what I thought I learned the truth at 17 It didn't help of course that I I'd gotten uh Schopenhauer in my hands and read all of him early my freshman year of college and His hatred of hagel and the academy undoubtedly had something to do with color in my sense of things At any rate, I thought well If I'm going to be a philosopher a serious philosopher, I need to get out of the academy and actually live a life Uh, not this half life that academics lead So I quit college threw away my scholarships The whole business and decided I would join the navy um I ended up not going to the navy just decided a few weeks before I was due to go that I Had made a mistake my Recruiter was luckily an honest man And told me that it was possible to get an official separation from the u.s. Government If I decided to go back to school since I joined delayed entry And so I did I went back to school, but I didn't go back to Worcester The professor who I liked best there had retired after I left So I ended up going to a high university and studying there Um, and I was there until I went to Rochester So what was it like, uh, staying at Rochester and working with Beck? What was it was It was terrific. Although it was a strangely maybe this is in some way an experience a lot of people have at different places But it was a strangely kind of dualistic experience on the one hand. I was spending a ton of time with Lewis white back I was spending a lot of time with Deborah Modrak and working in the history of philosophy But I was also spending a lot of time with Richard Feldman and Earl Connie and other people who were doing sort of Chisholm style if this you know, can you break this demology? And so the experience was kind of odd On the one hand, I was Spending time what a switch called them Ancient men in the corner spend their time with ancient things Spending my time with the history of philosophy and then the rest of the time I was trying to chisel in the way it best knows the P And so that made for a kind of curious experience because it wasn't always clear to me how to fit those projects together Especially in a sense How to fit them together given the self understanding of the sort of university of massachusetts influenced epistemology. I was being taught At the time they were trying to bridge the gap Yeah, yeah, I mean, you know, there of course there are people like like Chisholm himself who were remarkably broad and you know interesting but that side of the department at Rochester, I mean fine philosophers and and you know, very good folks, but they weren't much interested in Recapturing for themselves anything like Chisholm's erudition or breadth that just wasn't What they were interested in doing as philosophers Yes, sir, but back of course latest latest in an iteration of proposition S S prime prime consult the problems that s prime didn't quite solve Yeah, and then of course, I had you know, I was having coffee almost every morning with Lewis white back and he was of course a kind of monster of erudition Very different kind of philosopher the kind of philosopher who if you used an s and an asterisk in a paper would say now Kelly why are you disfiguring your prose? And so it was like I said a very different kind of experience because those morning coffees were Oriented on philosophy as an endeavor of a different kind in a way than the you know afternoon at the small industry classes often work I've been telling people your beck anecdotes for For years and we're the one about the the tip of practical reason you remember that one Yeah, we were in class one day and and beck was asking us about the tipic And he said so can anyone tell me what a tipic is? And of course we all sat there and kind of stunned and consternated silence And he looked around us and then finally a slow grin grew on his face and he said well boys and girls That odd dictionaries and we all looked of course humbled now and chastened and then he started laughing He said of course you'll find it in none of them And that was a fairly typical kind of exchange Beck he was kind of teacher who would turn you would say Kelly could you please reiterate for me the history of epistemology from crucious to huge You know that were just a menu item that you could rattle But he was a he was a wonderful teacher and a wonderful fellow I really I learned I learned a ton from him And he was maybe most strikingly just a remarkably humble man Remember being in his class on the critique of practical reason You hear he is the man who wrote The commentary on the critique of practical reason that stands to that critique and something like the relationship that norman kim Smith's commentary Stands to you know the first critique and some Wilful graduate student is telling back. Oh, no, no, you don't know how to understand this. I'll show you how it goes Start sort of scribbling on the board and Becks Becks sitting there looking at the board in like full Expectancy of the the problem being solved a problem that he just told us he's been 50 years trying to think through But he really thought maybe this student would have it You know in a few minutes in a few chalk speaks the answer would finally be before him And that was that attitude that he had kind of across the board And it was really it was super encouraging for you as a student because you never felt like His erudition was so to speak in judgment of you. It was there to be drawn on to be used But never never something as worse standing on looking down at you from I told my students the other day. I'll tell you one last story. You probably remember this one but I it came up in my philosophy of religion class the other day but I was talking to them about Becks had decision one day in a Nietzsche seminar to try to actually act out for us What a quadney experiment was you know, he was fascinated by Nietzsche's idea that metaphors are To be explained by these quadney experiments the Striking of a pitchfork and then holding it over a loose granular substance and the creation of a design There was no contact the design and the substance Nietzsche's metaphor for metaphors if you think about it Beck decided to reenact that sort of experiment for us so we could all appreciate how good this was this bit of Nietzsche So he came into class with a a green Folgers decaf can empty a piece of parchment paper a big red rubber band Some talcum powder and a pitchfork And so he proceeded to put the can down put the parchment paper over it tighten it into a drum with the rubber band dump talcum powder on the top of the parchment paper and then he picked up the pitchfork and without thinking what he was doing struck the can itself a mighty And talcum powder went everywhere and covered Beck from head to foot He stood there in the falling talcum powder and said that did not work as I intended for it to work No, and maybe a good description of what some of this goes wrong with Nietzsche though It really might be It was just a new Nietzsche theater But yeah, he was terrific a terrific teacher. Um, uh, okay, so When you started teaching around upstate new york was that was while you were still studying at rochester or I was at rochester four years. That was my fourth year At rochester. I got hired at sunyas we go To teach some classes and that was actually for me a kind of faithful thing because I ended up getting assigned An epistemology class to teach But I wasn't given the choice of the text that I was hired because someone had fallen ill And the course had already kind of gotten started. And so I had to take over and I was left with the syllabi and the book choices that that particular person had made and among the things that were chosen for that epistemology course was austin's sense and sensibilia and I had Heaped into that book at times perhaps even as austin himself perhaps intended Old into thinking I was looking for jane austin's sense and sensibility but But I had never really given the book, you know any serious consideration and teaching that book really kind of Reoriented me philosophically I went from there sort of on to Wittgenstein and other things that have been central to the the things I've worked on since but that that time teaching that book was Really really important for me and it wasn't you know planned. It was really just sort of an accident I just inherited this book and started trying to teach it and found that Well, I guess you know to put it in a way that say stanley cabell might put it I suddenly found my voice philosophically. I felt like I had something to say I knew where to enter a comment in a way that didn't always feel to me as Often had been the case in graduate school. Like I was just sort of chattering from the edges I'm actually speaking to something to someone in trying to think about what austin was doing So when did you get interested in Wittgenstein? How soon after that? Well, it was around the same time because around that same time I ended up as one of the final courses I took at Rochester taking a Wittgenstein class with Dennis O'Brien who was Then president of the university but also a member of the philosophy department And I took that course. I guess I took about half that course And then I ended up having to drop out of it because my son was born who was sick And so I actually wouldn't complete that course Until a couple of years later when I submitted my first published paper on Wittgenstein as my paper for that course That was sort of how I ended up finishing finishing that class but that class came on sort of the heels of the austin and had another really impactful Was really impactful for me And then I got started teaching the next fall here at Auburn and I Was reading on certainty And teaching Descartes and I mentioned some passages from uncertainty to students And a bunch of students stayed after class and asked me if I was willing to read that book outside of class with them And I said I would And that was really That was really when I began to work seriously. I think on Wittgenstein It wasn't the investigations actually that got me it was on certainty And I suppose that's because I kind of came into ordinary language philosophy as it was You know then thought of came in through the epistemological door as it were through sentences of the aliyah through uncertainty So let's see am I I'm missing any major steps along the way between you got me here in Here I've been Some of our more eagle-eyed viewers we have noticed a slight discontinuity in the video at this point The reason for which is that I had cleverly managed to steer the conversation in the direction of Kelly's time teaching at Sumi Oswego But then I Got myself off track because I was going to ask about a certain anecdote From his time at Oswego and said I ended up asking a question about Wittgenstein and that took us Farther field but I managed to lure Kelly back in here and I will insert This anecdote seamlessly into the rest of our interviews so Kelly you you have an anecdote about Oswego. Please Please tell it Yeah, I so when I taught there One of the things I found out I mean I'd been told it but it was one of those things You don't really fully understand until you've lived through it Oswego is basically a dumping ground for lake effect snow and so it's A place that sometimes gets an enormous amount of snowfall in almost no time One day. In fact, I was driving from Rochester over to Oswego to teach and Snow began to fall and to fall more quickly than I'd ever seen snowfall the ground went from Snowless to completely snowbound in just it seemed minutes and the Wind shield of my car for all intents and purposes was like someone had Taked white construction paper to it. I parked got out of the car and promptly walked into a telephone pole And then understood why people die in blizzards But one of the things that was really funny about Oswego that I discovered on this particular snowy day one of the few days By the way in Oswego's history. I think where they actually cancelled school because of snow it was that bad but it turned out there were ropes tied from the dining hall All the way to the doors of the various dorms on campus and the reason for this was because I was told at any rate In the past in particularly snowy conditions Students had left their dorms intending to get something to eat at the dining hall Wandered out onto the lake and froze to death And so they tied these ropes on on campus, which made it seem very spider web-like So that people could find their way in the blinding snow from building to dining hall Thank you, that's the I love the I love the background. I think it'll really aid the seamlessness of the transition Thanks, Rob. Thanks, and I'll now say I'll say goodbye to President Kelly and return us to uh past Kelly yeah So, um, you know as I mentioned your You You know your range of research interests is is Pretty broad although I think as he threads connecting many of them um now, so Can you say a little bit about just some of the you know Whatever of the research that you've done in the last few decades that sort of you find particularly you know You feel particularly inclined to you know to say something about Yeah, vague open-ended question, but yeah, well, I mean, you know At the at the center in many ways of Of what I've been interested in um Are those three principles that frega You know provides in the preface to the foundations of arithmetic Right, uh, you know always to separate the logical from the psychological the um uh You always separate the logical from the psychological the subjective from the objective Never ask for a word except the meaning of a word except in the context of a proposition and always sharply to separate concept and object I mean in many ways if you think about it almost everything I've done as a philosopher is in a way related to one of those three statements My concern with psychologism is if you think about it caught up In the first it's also caught up in various ways in the second and the third too But that's no surprise since on my understanding those three for principles of frega's are such that each presupposes the other two um, and so, you know My my way of my way of thinking about ordinary language philosophy against so-called is you know deeply Uh influenced by that context principle, which I think you know deeply influenced austin and deeply influenced bittgenstein Uh, and in the always to separate concept and object And that's the particular piece of frega that I've leaned on hardest. You know, I've been The sort of odd reader that's that's what your you know your frego slash wittgenstein book Yes, the concept horse book. Yeah, it's really really concerned centrally with that with that particular line um, and you know i'm the odd kind of reader of frega who You thinks that the concept object distinction for instance is much more interesting and much more Fruitful than this since reference distinction is Not that I think that that's not an important distinction, but you know my Yeah, no one has gotten more you know more attention more Got a lot more and I think in some ways it it doesn't go Nearly as deep into the structure of frega's thinking as the distinction between concept and object does so Lots of my work has in a way revolved around those three principles Even you know the work i've done in Say continental philosophy and so on has often for me been a way of trying to think about Those sorts of issues for instance when i'm reading someone like heidegger I'm almost almost always reading him as someone who was himself a reader Of husserl and deeply influenced by husserl's antipsychologism And so you know i'm really really deeply interested in phenomenology, but as much as anything i'm interested in as a way of trying to Sort of de-psychologize psychology A way of trying to think about the mind that doesn't fall into the pitfalls of psychologizing it And some of our viewers will be more hip to these concepts than others Could you say for those who aren't could you say a little bit about? Yeah, three rules of frega are are about and what's motivating them Yeah, well frega frega as i said States these three rules toward the end of the preface of the foundations of arithmetic and the rules come up in important ways in the unfolding of that brief text so You know there there are central sections where for instance the so-called context principle Which is the second of the three principles never asked for the meaning of a word Except in the context of a proposition there are places where you frega will invoke that explicitly and try to show you what it means He thinks it's it's it's a really important principle When you're trying to do what he tells you to do in the first principle or for instance He says always to separate the logical from the psychological Because in frega's brief comments about how to think about the three principles One of the things he says is that the important one of the reasons the context principle is important Is because it helps you to see That the meaning of a word can't be for instance an image in the mind You know that props up as it were as the word is we've thought of and He thinks that that's crucial because if you give into the idea That the meaning of a word is for instance an image in the mind Then you are failing to keep the first principle You're allowing the logical and the psychological to mix with one another You're allowing the objective and the subjective to mix with one another because frega thinks whatever meaning is It's not a psychological item. It's not an item in a subjective economy That's on the right way to understand it and so Keeping the context principle never asking for the meaning of a word except in the context of a principle Is a way among many other things, but it's a way frega thinks of sort of bridling yourself because When you allow yourself to ask for the meaning of a word outside the context of a proposition It's almost always going to be the case that your performance say of speaking the word will be accompanied by some mental picture I mean, it doesn't have to go that way, but it almost always is that way I mean if you don't think so just talk to intro students and ask them they'll report this experience to you reliably And they'll and they'll almost always pick a noun Oh, yes Always because as vittgenstein sort of complains at the very beginning of the investigations Exactly. Yeah, and you know, we just someone fairly against augustin since augustin was actually more More nuanced about this, but I don't know whether Whether vittgenstein read on the teacher or not or whether you just read that for sure Because on the teacher you say all right vittgenstein is I mean augustin is sort of sensitive to this worry of treating acting as though all words are nouns and treating each word is As carrying its meaning in virtue of a mental picture of the thing it stands for which You know might initially look plausible if you're talking about you know tree and car and cat um, but when you're getting to the and if and Yeah, of course, william james famously said the word, you know that the word you know the word if stands for a feeling of uncertainty Which suggests you forgot the you know the range of uses we actually use the word if in like um, you know if I say well You know because we often say things like um, uh Well You know If you're here now the party must really be starting or something like that We're not on any doubt as to whether they're there now No, there's really no iffy-ness about it And you might say in that particular case in the sense of iffy that james that's in mind There's a kind of philosophical desperation to try and come up with you know to make the word If stand for a feeling and then of course that's that famous Paper on feeling william james's butt with a right the title is the best part of that paper Paper in fact I have I commented on the man who wrote that paper A paper of his before he wrote that paper trying to Explain to him the sort of rampant Psychologizing that led to that paper, but I'm afraid My words fell on deaf ears Yeah, I mean the the time when you see the title you think it's going to be a parody of William james's position, but it actually ends up conceding much more to james on that point than Than one would have hoped yeah Yeah, no, that's right And I think you know one of the things that that frega helps you see and of course the consign too is concerned with this Putting this in frega's terminology, you know frega distinguish between what he called the the saturated and the unsaturated parts of propositions But it's amazing. I think how easy it is to fall into the idea That the you know the so-called saturated parts Of propositions are just saturated on their own You know if you represent the unsaturated parts with empty parentheses that I know this is a little so technical But this is how frega thought about it. So, you know in like silver as a horse silver is sort of the saturated part Blank is a horse is the unsaturated part. It's unsaturatedness Is represented by the empty parentheses and it's easy when you see this happen with students all the time When you try to teach them this it's easy for them to look at that and think oh, but I get it Saturated terms are just saturated on their own They don't think of saturated as being a term that you know as it were stands in intimate relationship with unsaturated. It's a contrast Yeah, it's like I mean it's easy to see It's easy to see that blank is a horse isn't a complete Thought because there's a blank. Yeah, um, but you know but uh you know Silver uh, you know as considered as a name, um Just as a as a noun or as a it was a proper noun uh It's easy to think that that has A meaning just on its own because it's true that you know the way it works is different from the way that Some of things work, but you know if you just go around and say nouns I mean of course given the right context just going around They know slab Context is in a way a way of sneaking parentheses in. Yeah, but like them, but uh, you know, if you just say silver What about it? Uh, you know, you haven't actually You haven't actually asserted a complete thought the um, the noun is um you know the function of a noun depends on the various kinds of of Of non nouns it can productively hook up with and the functions of the non nouns function You know depend on the the nouns it can they can productively hook up with And so like so that's this idea that the it has to be something more like a complete sentence or statement has to be the bearer of the meaning and the The individual words it's because you know, there's this you know the idea that frege vittgenstein As you know, but i'm sort of helping to explain this to my readers. There's this idea that The meaning of sentences my viewers not my readers the meanings of sentences are built up from the meanings of the words the words each have individual meanings and they carry their full fledged meaning on their own and then you Put them together like lego blocks and the meaning of the whole sentence Is to derive from the meanings of the words? um And you know that can look more plausible in some cases than others, you know Uh Grass is green. You can think all right grass. We picture some grass green your picture field of greenness is Well, you're not quite sure what the picture for the is or maybe you picture some sort of Parmigli ghostly link between the grass and the green um uh uh But you know once you have guys start getting anything more I mean, you know strictly speaking. It doesn't even work at that level, but you can see how it could be Uh, you know appealing at that level, but what do you think about any sort of complex sentence like uh, you know Oh Well, if this grass is green, uh You know, whatever else might be green uh or something like that, you know, you've got a whole bunch of words there that don't seem to Carry little pictures on their own Um, whatever else might be. What do you picture? um Maybe william james would be able to heroically come up with some kind of Sensation for whatever else it might you whatever else might you might might be sort of might makes right to some sort of from power or might be the sort of feeling of possibility, but but um you know, uh You know just try forming a proposition by you know getting a feeling of possibility or a feeling of uncertainty going on together and you just get sort of a Symphony of vague unease But you haven't actually started anything well indiscriminately off-peller Yeah, it's it's you know, one of the things I like to point out to students just to get them thinking about this I'm not saying it's you know, I'm not going to drive out proof or something, but it certainly is Powerful moment for students often. It's just to get them to open up the page of the dictionary And then just to say well look at the entries, you know is every word and now Aren't there many words for which there are, you know Multiple entries across parts of speech. How do you figure out which part of speech or where it is when the word in isolation is Just on a page in front of you Mark well, I mean that could be a name It could be a verb, you know could be a now it could be a verb. What do you know? What do you get an imperative? Yeah, it could be all kinds of things and you know just getting students to sort of start there as a way of trying to get them to see Past something like the sort of blinding familiarity of nouns Their inability to kind of look past them the kind of thing that again as you were saying Victor Stein is worried about right in the opening passages of The investigations. Yeah, so I'll just say this for my viewers He quit at the beginning of the investigations. He quotes this passage from Augustine from the Confessions for Augustine's describing how he learned language as a child and he says basically you know You know my elders pointed at things and said the names of them tree dog, etc And so that's how I learned Which is not obviously not going to be helpful for understanding You know the difference say between A noun like runner and a verb like runs, you know you point point at both things are you point to someone who's running Are you taught how you just mean runner or runs or or whatever? And obviously it's completely unuseful for You know for the ifs and the those of the Butts and the ends You know and then as I mentioned earlier Uh, you know Augustine's more it's more sensitive to this worry than you might think from just from that passage that Victor Stein quotes in the beginning of the Confessions because Augustine has another work on the teacher de Magistro Uh where he quotes this line of poetry is something like you know If if of so great a city nothing be left Uh, I think that this is something like that is the line he quotes and uh you know, so there's you know The only thing you could really try to run the picture theory on is city there but If of nothing what does nothing stand for does it stand for nothingness of bass and void and if enough So and great and be and left. Uh, yeah, I did um That's an inspired choice a really great example. Yeah, so, uh, you know, Augustine was was was sharper than Victor Stein would give him credit for of course That doesn't change the fact that his example in the Confessions is You know is less than helpful and I don't think as you know, I don't think Victor Stein's real point there is to pound away on august and I he Is he's a handy example of and it was important because it was said From Victor Stein's point of view it was important because it was said first by august and but also because it was said In a kind of offhand g shucks. This must be true sort of way And augustin might have had more sober thoughts or second one of the second thoughts But I think Victor Stein thought it was really a Victor Stein always thought it was particularly important When something that looked like a philosophical confusion arose in just sort of ordinary context ordinary life You know, he was always fascinated by for instance Detective films and how sometimes philosophical problems would come up in detective films And you thought it was very important that they came up there um, I remember he has some passage where he talks about some detective story in which um, not a film but a written story in which You know some of the characters musing about time and yes, and there were moments of the clock and about how You know, maybe time doesn't really exist um Without any real motivation for what's going on here. It's just it's a bit of philosophical uh Wisdom or or wisdom that has lodged itself in this in this person's mind, you know and there are lots of doctrines that are sort of really philosophical doctrines and often perhaps dubious ones that That just seem to be generally accepted like just the other day. I uh in class, um in my uh In my philosophy east and west class i'm talking about the the dispute of between Representational realists and direct realists about perception in indian philosophy and the debates look very much like the ones The ones in western philosophy Uh, and I mentioned that to many people nowadays representational realism just seems like common sense um Although at one time direct realism did but now Representational realism did because people it's just something people have grown up It's not necessarily the common sense and sense of the way they actually Relate to their ordinary experience because they usually think that they are actually Seeing their friends regularly rather than just seeing images of their friends, but It's something that they think has been established by you know photons and science to to quote our We live in a popular science and it's always a bad time for thinking um And you know the idea that well, of course, there's all kinds of causally intermediary stuff going on between the the thing that you are perceiving and your perception of it um It doesn't mean that you Did you perceive the thing by perceiving any of the links? in that chain um But you know just to a lot of students. It just seems this this representational way of thinking this seems natural Because it's a bit of it's a bit of sort of quasi philosophical uh Lore that they just you know, they were they learned in uh You know, they learned it maybe in school. It's not even the most pernicious one I mean the whole fact versus opinion one maybe the worst one. Yeah I had a student in the doorway of my office a couple of years ago Who's you know, kind of wonderful living illustration of the thing you're talking about You know, we're talking about basically representational and direct realist issues and he just could not understand Why I thought there was any question about the representational story And I finally just looked at it. He was standing maybe 15 feet from me I was back in my office near the bookshelf and he was in the doorway and I said, so where am I? and he went And that traveling of his finger from pointing at where I was to pointing at his own head You know the way capture is just exactly what's going on with students so often No, that's sort of and If he thinks that you're in there that I think he's going beyond representational realism The next step. Yeah, what happens in Indian philosophy too? There's gonna be um, you know the Buddhists get pressured from direct realism to representational realism to a kind of phenomenalism um by a kind of Objective tendency of the problematic so to speak Yeah, and that's you know, that's certainly that was really true of this student Couldn't sort those positions out and that like I said that eloquent movement of his pointed finger The illustration of his of his profoundly disquieted state of philosophical mind. Where's the hand? Where's the goddamn hand? But you don't often get you know, something epitomized for you so clearly Uh in philosophy is that as that did that particular students confusions um What do you think about the about vichtenstein's You know, there seems to be some disagreement about the extent to which vichtenstein was aware of or engaged with You know much of the history of philosophy because on some views he just seems to have Have just junked the whole thing as as garbage and ignored it But there are other views according to which he was sort of kind of aware of at least parts of it and Sort of engaged with it, but just didn't always talk that much about it Do you have any views on that because obviously you are a lot more engaged with history of philosophy explicitly Yeah, than vichtenstein was. Yeah, um I mean There's that there's that great line of of stanley cabels where he says, you know the Two greatest philosophers of the 20th century each cultivated a myth about himself vichtenstein that he'd read no philosophy in high degree that he'd read at all And I mean vichtenstein I think a lot of times students of vichtenstein's I mean, of course, they were overwhelmed by his personality. You know, I'm many ways kind of glad I never knew the man But I he was he was someone who sort of insisted on what you might call naked confrontations of personalities I mean, as they ever lend or somewhere somewhere uses a phrase like that talking about vichtenstein You know, you go to his rooms and there'd be no books No pictures nothing just two chairs And you sit to talk with him and it was like, you know, okay, this is it There's nothing to talk about except us. Here we are. I won't guard play. No props. Yeah. Yeah, and I think that that that feature of his probably added to The kinds of things he would sometimes say about the history of philosophy, you know made it seem as though He really did philosophizes it were without books around. It was all just being spun out of his head um He would complain to geach about dragging out, you know dragging The assyrians into the discussion Because geach would always want to bring peter geach who always want to bring pieces of the history of philosophy into vichtenstein's discussion And vichtenstein was not in a hurry That to happen But I think that, you know, if you know vichtenstein's history, you know that he certainly was influenced by philosophers like schopenhauer He'd read schopenhauer. He later kind of repented of having read schopenhauer But he had read schopenhauer and schopenhauer clearly left an impact on the pages of the factotas And you know though, we hadn't made perhaps on this general cheery disposition Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah The old woman is dead. The dead is paid. They both had that kind of disposition. Obidonus, Abidonus But I I do think he I do think he cultivated this image of himself as sort of free of the history of philosophy In many ways. I think that there's something to be said for a certain kind of independence from the history of philosophy certain kind of You know willingness to to sort of try to start over, you know Frederick Weisman once tried to get vichtenstein to write a book with him He said it turned out to be impossible because every time they met vichtenstein started wanted to start writing it again You know to start over Every time, of course, you're never going to get anywhere like that. That's that was vichtenstein He was sort of an eternal beginner. I think in a way in philosophy and so he you know, he had a hard time seeing himself as As you're climbing as it were on the onto the shoulders of others But he knew that he did um when you look at culture and value that collection of of remarks of his There are numerous places where he he kind of cycles through People who've left an impact on his thinking and of course there are philosophers among them There are also people we wouldn't ordinarily think of you know as philosophers among them composers and other people who Making a mark on his thinking but his thinking was but in this way was certainly very culturally alive very culturally influenced Very acculturated He was a man despite all his attempts to denude his rooms of the culture. He was a man. I culture in many ways And that's something again, I think it's easy to forget about him But was true So, you know, I'm not I've never been a huge fan of the sort of Of the of the view of him that says, you know, he hated the history of philosophy. I think that's not true You know when when malcolm suggested that he call philosophical investigations just philosophy If you shine, you know, sort of how to fit how could I possibly Use that word that's meant so much in the history of human beings We're fine Uh, so I think you know, his attitude was was interestingly complicated and of course, you know, he he read a gust and he loved he loved the confessions Uh, he'd read enough of the dialogues to know how to complain about them. Um, yeah So, you know, the idea, you know, the little the little phrases in vikestine that are Often seem to be borrowed from augustin or play it or somewhere and often he'll sort of twist them on their heads or something That's a Yeah, we've been we've been abusing william james, but uh, uh You know vikestine often began his his classes in cambridge by reading In philosophy psychology, uh book that he you know, he liked and of course he'd read varieties of religious experience over and over again He really loved themes has his better moments in his worst moments. No doubt about it. No, I mean, that's true of us all but But james is yeah, james is sort of all over the map in many ways. I mean, I I really Admire james in lots of ways for all that I also deeply disagree with him about many things but I often as you know teach him in various classes because I think he is Of philosophy or a philosopher who writes in such an engaging and interesting way And he wrote for a public that's so different than the public For which people write these days and certainly very different from the audience shifting terms here or which philosophers write these days In my students in philosophy or religion are just now beginning to reckon with how educated the educated public James's writing for was compared to the people they know You know, and so I keep telling them well, this isn't very technical and they're like They have to use the dictionary to understand it. Well, I didn't say it was done down I said it wasn't technical Those are two different things You know, yeah, and of course they uh You know educated writers often freely peppered their You know their texts with with uh latin or greek and french of course, uh, you know Everyone assumed everyone knew french and latin and you know if they were lucky they would know greek as well Yeah, um, so, you know, we didn't translate those things. It would just be It would be condescending to translate Yeah, our students have this interestingly related attitude. I don't look them up because it would be work So he didn't condescend and Boys and girls. Yeah, there are dictionaries boys and girls. It's the whole time they're there Yeah, well not in the english dictionaries anyway Well, of course, you know, a lot of your research interests Uh, you mentioned victim's time being interested both in people you traditionally think of as philosophers and people you might think of as Not so much philosophers, but sort of various cultural Other producers of other kinds of cultural products, but your own work has sort of, you know, spread the gamut across those Yeah, uh Those things. Yeah, you know in many ways. I I mean I suppose you know a long time ago. I I I ran ran across that line. I may be Misremembering in fact, perhaps I've turned it into a motto in a misremembered form, but there's some place where patelle talks about um, a certain kind of loyalty to your own experience and I don't know. I guess I kind of took that hard in what I've done. I've I've tried to allow myself to To take the things I take seriously Seriously enough to try to understand why I take them seriously, you know, why I would care about them I want to try to find, you know, something like articulate reasons for Items of popular culture or music or whatever it might be that I you know that I care about and that I find Instructive and maybe even instructive in a way that I want to call philosophical without necessarily Trying to apply that term to the producer you know On your blog you just finished up a A discussion of just finishing up a rereading of a bunch of Jane Austen. Yeah Yeah, I reread Austin pretty much every summer. I guess I sort of like Like rile rile was asked once if you read novels and he said yes all six every year It's sort of my attitude I've reread Austin every summer since I was 20 something I guess And you know, I've I've found her tremendously interesting in fact, I just just today and I I set up my spring 4970 course here at Auburn is of course on Austin and the grammar of morality So I'm going to do a class on On Austin taking seriously the idea that rile has in that great essay of his on Jane Austen and the moralists That Austin approaches as he puts it from the south side what a philosopher's approach from the north side So trying to think about Austin in conjunction with Aristotle and Aquinas and Samuel Johnson and trying to read some of the best of Austin criticism that often Focuses on the way she understands the moral life the kind of challenge and moral challenges that Characters are facing because of course The novels aren't really just about Women trying to get married There's something going on about that all the time, of course, but That becomes really just The the venue in which all of this all of this moral stuff happens and Austin's ability to To you know delineate all that in a particularly fine way to trap Characters across time and conversations in ways that are revelatory of their virtues and vices and of their changes From virtue device or vice to virtue so on all that I think is really you're really instructive and so Looking forward to teaching that class and see what students have to say about it In the last interview I did with My friend Gary Chartier. We were talking about and remembering the the great exchange in which stillman's film metropolitan Where one of the characters is a big fan of Jane Austen the other one was severely critical and as they Go on talking it turns out that the critical one has never actually read Austin pieces well uh You know, I don't see any need to you know to read the works when I can just read good literary criticism instead At least in reading literary criticism. I you know, I can avoid that feeling I always get reading fiction that the author has just made it all up I Forgotten that scene. Yeah, yeah Yeah, stillman sympathies are clearly with austin, you know I mean A lot of a lot of that film just you know feels like an updated version of an austin film in some ways Yeah, that's right. It does And and I do think austin suffered, you know about as much as any any novelist has from A certain kind of preconception. I mean part of it is that there are things she said That are I think often taken out of context and then said over and over again like her bit about You know two inches of ivory You know being as it were the scope she needed to do her novels And the idea seems to be for most people who hear that that You know, you couldn't upon those two inches of ivory inscribe anything of great importance in human life You know, all you could do is familiar with nanotechnology Yeah, and in a way, you know, austin was the really an early nanotechnologist I mean, I think austin's you know when austin writes to It's a relative and says, you know, three or four country three or four families in a country town That's just the thing What she means isn't oh, that's all I can control as an artist What she means is everything that I could possibly care about will happen there if I arrange it the right way You know make it up But you know, I can get I can get sort of the whole panoply of human life and human nature You know shown In that three or four families in that country town And I think it provides ample opportunities for various kinds of virtual advice wisdom and folly learning Refusals to learn Well, I have to tell students, you know, I'm like, look, you know that that's seen in emma on box Hill Is in many ways, you know in the context of an emma novel Like as fraught with significance is what happens on little round top is at Gettysburg You know, I mean, you know, you can't see that you can't see what austin's doing I mean Emma's undoing happens on box Hill And it's crucially important that it happens there and happens in the way that it does You know her mortification And her correction by night and by nightly All that is, you know the major event in the novel is is is there, you know, any sound of canon You know or any any screaming charge? No, but it's certainly fraught Actually, I will somewhat egocentrically inflict on you and on my uh On my viewers a poem I wrote a few years back that makes a Similar point don't worry. It's very short um It's called after the apocalypse No radioactive rubble smokes beneath the broken moon No armies of marauding mutants rampage across the desolate earth And yet today is after the apocalypse For the apocalypse comes to each of us privately And the man sitting beside you They'd be struggling for survival in a devastated world Yet not a ripple marrs the surface of his visage Yeah, yeah, well, that's that's right and privilege Even a kind of happy austinian sounding word But no, I think that's that that's right rodrick. I think that and I do think that is that is austin's understanding of what she's doing the idea is Look, you know, what's happening here is so to speak in a sense as as full of human significance These betrayals are as full of significance as any betrayal on a larger political stage I mean, maybe there are fewer people in a sense caught in its field of consequences But that doesn't make it any less of betrayal than it is the body count is to maybe lower, but yeah, yeah Certainly lower a box hill than it was a little round Yeah, but of course on the other hand you know The number of box hills in our lives is greater than the number of little round tops and so And I do think that's that's also very very important to austin You know that that's one of the things that she's trying to get us to understand is how how often In the context of a regular day, we have these moments where We could be beside the person who's in a desolate landscape and we just have no clue Or we find ourselves in one and can do nothing to help ourselves About it. I think that is the kind of thing that she's really concerned with and why she thinks that real-life families in a country town is out of what we're showing what she's interested in showing Yeah, well since I've been I've uh inflicted one of my poems on on as I should I will remind us that you You have a relatively recent Volume of poetry of your own you want to see a little bit about How you got into Doing that and how the connections you see between Your poetic work and your philosophical works and the afterward to that you make clear that you do see Yeah Yeah, I I've been interested in poetry for a long time written at it for a long time. I have The book of poems that you mentioned. I have a another book finished. I just haven't Haven't really done anything with it yet but For me and and there's actually as you know a poem in that In that first book stony lonesome. It's largely concerned with frega And partly is concerned with frega because of the disparaging things about poetry that frega had to say Well, maybe disparaging is a little strong, but at any rate By the way, I assume that the comma after I have between okay and vows most deliberate in one of those poems Yeah, I really like that um but yeah, the uh The the reason why I mentioned I mentioned frega is because I I tend to think that one of the things that makes poetry of of deep interest is the way in which something like logical syntax is So much a part of what it is. You know poetry isn't the the abandoning Of logical syntax. It's something like the exploitation of logical syntax for all you can possibly get from it and I think that makes poetry in many ways a deeply logical kind of endeavor I mean, I I recognize that i'm courting paradox with that phrasing But I do think it's a deep logical kind of activity and I think it's It's also a use of language that's really interesting to reflect on From a kind of fregian or vikestinian perspective. You know, what is going on the vikestine says, you know For a large class of cases, but not for all the meaning of the words. It's use in the language you know Did he have It's use in poetry in mind or would that have been excluded or was that among the things he had in mind? You know, it's I think interesting to think about that and so A lot of a lot of my interest in poetry is in a way an interest in In language and in its possibilities What you can do with a word You know the the magic of enchantment and things of that sort uh fascinate me and so I don't really think of it as You know time spent so to speak away from philosophy, although I don't think of it as philosophizing as such But I do think that much that I care about as a philosopher carries over Into what I'm thinking about When I'm when I'm writing poetry and so It's also and I guess I will say this and just kind of fly the different Tack on this. It's also for me always been a useful thing just because It's helpful to get out of the kind of posture you have to be in to write philosophy And to take up a different posture, you know, sort of, you know, take up when you're writing poetry Find yourself in a venue in which Each word is in a sense just as fraught as it is in philosophy, but now fraught in a new way You know, there's a different set of of conventions and a different set of of criteria guiding choice And so on and that's for me at any rate helpful because I sometimes Really need to just stop hearing philosophy in my head And it's like okay enough, you know, FH Bradley, let's read TS Eliot Though that's a bad example since of course Bradley was a huge influence on Eliot It's hard to read Eliot without hearing FH Bradley as a matter of fact Well, since you've touched on two of the books, one of which is a little bit about the third about Chuck And which I confess I have not read the Chuck book yet because you say it right at the beginning Don't read this unless you've watched the show No, like 90 episodes or something of the show and I haven't watched any of them yet. So Not to get us 100 to allow it to be We've shown again on regular tv. Uh, yeah, I wrote that book I got Taken by that show. I was at home sick and just started watching it on netflix. I'd I'd seen The first couple of episodes. I think when they came out But that was back when I was department chair and you know, my kids were still pretty young and I was just super busy And I lost track of the show and so I started watching it that day sick on the couch and It just kind of overwhelmed me. There were lots of things about it that interested me I mean among them was The way in which the the problem of other minds is central to the show I mean if you think about spy shows, it's not that hard to see that's going to be true But chuck, I think worries that problem more in a way. Maybe because it has 90 some episodes Worries that problem more than a lot of a lot of things of that sort do and keeps coming back to it and coming back to it in ways that I find Rich and interesting because it's for instance the show doesn't just pose the question of other minds that you might think of as The sort of spectatorial question, you know, how do I know that that That moving body is minded But it asks what you might think of as the agential question. How can I make my own mind known? Or what do I have to do to keep my own mind from being known? That question I think is really Again in his book on Shakespeare says talks about that as a quite a big major question in the fellow Yeah, because Yago's trying to keep his mind from being known Desdemona is desperately trying to make her mind known Um, and so the difficulty I was involved in both back. I have a paper on that uh Which you may have read I don't remember. I don't know if I have you need to you should put in my mailbox It could happen. At any rate I that that really interests me the sarah character in the show the the spy character Is a character who you know, it has in a sense not been known In a sense never known and who's I think in many ways in despair of being known But also terrified of the consequences of being known, you know, all very Shakespearean in its way Uh, and the show does a really interesting job of thinking about that At any rate I got really caught up in in that I got really caught up in what I think of as the show's Thorough going contra contra puntle structure The way its episodes are united with one another not just through, you know, like Temporal relations or causal relations, but also through structural formal meaningful relations All that really caught my attention. And so I got kind of excited about the show Um, I Set down and wrote a blog post about it And then I stood up and my wife was asking me what I was doing and I told her I'd written this blog post about the show And she said we seem really interested in the show and I said, yeah, I think I can write a book about that show And she said oh, yeah, and I said, yeah, I think I can do it in a month. And so about three weeks later I had the book Um, it was just one of those things just kind of where you have something just kind of pour out of you for some reason Uh, a lot of things I've been thinking about Got touched on in a certain way in the show and they kind of came together in The writing of that book. I mean, I tried to I tried to keep the book More or less popular in tone. Although this goes back to that comment about james and an educated audience You know, I'm not sure if it's really super accessible for just everyone But I do think anyone who reads it with some degree of seriousness can you know can follow along and see what's See what's happening in the book and the way in which I'm interested in the problem of other minds the way in which I'm interested in the appearance reality distinction and its many inflections in the show Uh, the way in which I'm interested in the language of the show the particular kind of density and resonance that it has and the devices that are used for Achieving that all those things I think are Reasonably approachable and easy enough to see but I do think it's hard to understand if you Watch the show because it is it is very much Unsaturated you need to fill in the blank spot with the 90 some episodes. You're not going to know what what I'm saying Why would mean anything? Well, I I do hope to get around to the show. So my main motivation for reading the show so that I can then You know read the read the book with more profit I'm I'm working right now actually on sort of re redoing the book As you know, the book had a kind of funny history. I wrote it very quickly I sent it off. It got accepted for publication immediately And then the publisher got cold feet because I since I'm interested in the language I quote fairly extensively from the show They were worried. So they were they told me I needed to talk to Warner Brothers and make sure Warner Brothers would okay it I finally found a Warner Brothers lawyer who Basically told me well, we just don't okay anything of this sort. So we don't have to think about it Uh, and so the publishers were like well if Warner Brothers won't say it's okay Even though we think it's within the bounds of fair use. We don't we're not sure we should publish it. And so I ended up deciding well I'm not going to fight with this anymore because I'll probably end up having to jump through the same hoop again Uh, I'll just put it out there. I won't charge any money for it. There won't be any question me making any money from it Um, and I'll let it let it be available and and it's been read and read and read I've been really pleased by the audience the book has had even if it never had any formal formal publication right another question is you know, there's sort of a divide among those people who think that there is a you know an unbridgeable gap between Sort of viconstinian approaches to religion and sort of more traditional like medieval approaches to religion where one seems like a You know a metaphysically freighted conception and another is one that sort of dispenses with any kind of metaphysical description On the other hand, you've got people like geach and anskin. Well, obviously thought that you could do a Uh, you know, you could do a fairly tight marriage between, you know, let's say Aquinas and viconstin Uh, however much people each one might be unhappy with the you know with the shotgun wedding there And you know, my impression is I often feel like you're somewhere in between There but I'm not sure where Well, I'm not sure if I know where Roderick to be honest. I mean, yes I mean my sympathies lie with geach and anskin in various ways um and You know, you mentioned my interest in orthodox theology. I mean among the things that draws me to orthodox theology is it's Uh, it's apathetic way of thinking about religion, uh, kind of, you know Be a negativa and I mean just for the sake of uh Of uh, my viewers, this is this is the view that you can't you can't describe A, you know, any positive properties or descriptions Uh to god you can you can only say, you know, god is not this god is not that but you can't literally describe anything to god, which is um Supposed to be different from the analogical view that you can say god is wise and so forth, but analogically although how different it is is That's of course one of the reasons I'm also not sure about where I stand exactly in relationships people like anskin and geach New geach has that really interesting paper on analogical predicates And how far he is from, you know, some sort of apatheticism. I'm not sure At any rate there's I think again for People who know vittgenstein and know particularly vittgenstein's thinking about logic There's something right undeniably right. I think about saying that vittgenstein was a sort of apathetic logician Logic travels the via negativa and you know, that can that could make you think well Then if you're going to think about religion from vittgenstein point of view, it's going to have to be this You know sort of met with this way of thinking about religion that's shorn of metaphysical commitment, you know And so on but I'm not sure that's quite right. I mean, I'm not sure that the vittgenstein would have thought that was quite right I don't think that vittgenstein's going to be Comfortable with Any view of religion on which religious language Who just turns out to be as it were standard cognitive language or turns out to be Just as it were figures of speech that vary from Standard cognitive language as figures of speech vary from standard cognitive language. I don't think because I'm thought into that I think he's you know much closer to someone like cure regard I'm thinking that no, you know to understand religious languages to take up a particular kind of point of view It's a kind of understanding that's different from the kind of understanding that's Events when you come to understand a new metaphor or something like that is a shift in perspective of a kind that has to occur personal perspective has to occur In order for it to work, but I'm not sure how far I I know To take all of that and I can say those things. I have some feeling that that's right or I mean right I have quite a I'm quite sure it's right of cure regard. I mean it seems right to me more generally Right at the phenomenon, but I I will say this is an area of my own thinking that's certainly Very much. W. I P When uh, you know, this is where I'm I'm still very much at sea about a lot of things myself I'm not sure quite what I think I Yes, I tell my students in my philosophy of religion class where we start with James and with Royce with their controversy over varieties of religious experience Royce's response and sources of religious insight I do think that the philosophy of religion as it's standardly done in analytic philosophy is Sort of unresponsive to the full range of the phenomenon James's varieties remember has as a subtitle a study in human nature That seems to me to be sort of where you orient yourself to get going with all of this not on You know a particular proposition on a board of particular syllogism On a board not that any of that's illegitimate or won't be something that we eventually do I just like my students to remember what the actual phenomenon of religious life looks like Before we start worrying about what the proofs are of the existence of God Yeah, I mean this is listen It's sort of released vaguely related to you know one of my contributions to the to that Wittgenstein key textbook Where I talk about in what sense of Wittgenstein can and what since they can't Embrace a project of metaphysics. Yes, because you know a lot of views, you know If you're Wittgenstein or if you're even sort of heavily Wittgenstein Then there's nothing that looks like all like traditional metaphysics that's permissible at all And I want to say well, I mean I don't get sort of a definite sorting out of what to say but I say well You know in effect. Well, it depends what you mean. It depends how you're using the term metaphysics Or you know what you know what moves you're actually Making with that the fact that something doesn't Doesn't play its standard and this also connects with what you just said about poetry And the fact that something doesn't play its standard A word doesn't play its standard Role in the in the language doesn't mean that it's just sort of completely idling Yes, it can be doing something You know more complicated and There may not be any literal way of of describing it, um You know just as you know and the whole point of you have the um you know of the concept horsebook is uh that you know that Concepts and for egos since you can't really say anything about because that would put them in the in the You know in the position of the sentence that the head gets things attributed to them and said that the attributing part as you can't say anything about them So in a sense, you know logic is ineffable in that sense. It's not ineffable in a sense of whoo It's just you know, it's just a it's a logical point that uh, you know if the nature of something is uh, you know is to attribute properties to something Then if you start talking about it as the thing that gets properties attributed to it, you're sort of changing the subject Yes, literally. Um And that doesn't mean that you can't Make clear of what you mean, uh, you know, even though strictly speaking literally uh, you know, if I say uh, you can't um You know, you can't apply properties to the concept horse Strictly speaking from freguin and revicantian terms. That's nonsense. But it's not just plain old blue nonsense It's useful nonsense because it it helps you See You know, it helps you see how to use how to use the terms. Yeah. Yeah, someone is not a name you know, it's uh these kinds of things that Function is something like what frego was thinking of the lucidations That have a particular role to play even if they turn out not to be things that are so to speak susceptible formulation in the logical language thus formulated Yeah, no, I think that's right and again, that's but that's also connected as you know with You know my thought about sort of apathatism and the ineptability because I mean, you know We talked about at the beginning of our discussion the freguin's three principles But I suppose in many ways maybe even deeper than that for me at the center of what I've done As a philosopher has always been the contrast between the epible and the ineptible For some reason that contrast That's that line of of a have some of it that it keeps me it tasks me I can't stop thinking about what can't be said Well, uh, if you uh Yeah, you come into a philosophy part in parts through vikinstein and you got the whole You know got the whole truck taught us there balancing on the balancing on a on an afterward of negation Sorry, I couldn't actually say any of that But I had some reason for writing it Yeah, there's that great line of character. There's a difference between writing a book and revoking it and not writing it at all Yeah, I can I could type a bunch of stuff and then you know use the Use the the function and where to put a line through it. It's still perfectly readable So I've published if I published that with the lines through it, but you can read it all then You know, it's not the same thing. It's just you know Not writing it up. Yeah um So what are you working on these days? well, um I've been tinkering with fiction. Um, and so Over the last couple of years I've written An embarrassing number of novels that I haven't tried to publish Uh, I've been continuing to tinker with that some That's not completely new because I remember when I first came to arbor and you showed me some short stories that you'd written Yeah, I've been interested in that, you know in in writing fiction for a long time I just I hadn't tried really hadn't tried made a serious run at a novel until about two years ago when I Of course first did it and in many ways like a lot of things I work on admit They're often just you know, sort of contests between me and me. I just want to I just want to prove to myself that I can do it You know, can I pull this off? But I've I've been working on that but right now I'm working on uh, actually a paper on cabel and kirker guard Uh for a volume That's coming out on cambridge on the 50th anniversary. It must we need what we say? So I'm I'm working on that essay of cabels on kirker guards authority and revelation That's the thing. I'm literally currently writing. It's on the other screen on my computer. Uh, I've been working on that I've been tinkering for a while now on a book on thorough that I have parts Of written but that I never remember seeing you remember years ago some Something from you. Uh, look at the beginning of that. Yeah, I've had I've had stuff around for a long time I've got a lot of pieces part of the problem has been that I've never been able quite to decide what the audience is that I want to target with it and so I kind of go back and forth and How to pitch it because there's a I mean one of the things I'd really like to be able to do in the book is to To talk about what I think is a really interesting and fruitful connection between Transcendent wasn't generally in Thoreau's version in particular and Merleau Ponty's book the visible and the invisible But you know the Merleau Ponty is Extraordinarily hard to understand And so trying to write for an audience that could do anything with the Merleau Ponty Is to write for an audience much smaller smaller than the audience that could presumably do something with a lot of what I'd want to say about Thoreau So I've been able quite to that's one of the things I haven't been able to sort you can stick Merleau Ponty into a later chapter Yeah, it's true. So they would you know, they would get through all of it until they got to that last chapter and then they would snap shut The salad was great. The entree was great. The dessert is a little it is a little tough But still you had a good meal anyway Yeah, yeah, so I've been I've been taking with that Thoreau book for a long time because I'd really like to I'd really like to try to to write a book on Walton I really do have that ambition and so I'd like to I'd like to get it done and then beyond that I've got Some new stuff on I've been thinking about some new stuff with frega and dickenshine though I haven't really launched any project there, but it's been on my mind And I've I've gotten I mentioned him a few minutes ago in passing in a different context, but I've also gotten Really interested again in fh Bradley a philosopher that I I got interested in as a freshman in college I don't know what it is exactly about Bradley that I find so interesting But I do find him very interesting and I'd like to At some point try to write a bit about Bradley in the next year or so so Still thinking about how that might work, but I'd like to do that I remember during my early years here one of the courses of years I sat in on was when going through cavelle's pursuits of happiness, which is a a book He goes through what he calls comedies of remarriage a bunch of A bunch of hollywood films mostly from the 30s and 40s Uh That sometimes are treated under the general category screwball comedies, but in particular they are often about the reuniting of couples who had split up hence the hence the title But he but he takes them to have sort of you know, a philosophical weight that they don't know if they have and that was really an interesting course, and I think we also read a little bit of Was it the claim of reason that we read a bit of in there? Yeah, that's that that book. I was just actually talking with a student about that book the other day Yeah, I really as you know, I really admire that book and I love those films the ones that cavelle collects there to to think about um, and you know certainly My interest in things like television in things like chuck, you know is Downstream from all of that That stuff the work on those films and so on I I agree with cavelle that there's There's gold in them. There are hills. You just have to sort of know how to pan for it How to find it there are things of real interest philosophically And yeah, I'd like to I'd like to teach that class again. Maybe I will you know sometime soon It's been a it's been a while since I've I've gone back and saw those movies as a group I do see One or another of them every now and then because I just love them so much But it's but it is fun to see them sort of in in series As cavelle's thinking about them. Are you the one who got me under Gerald Mast's book on Howard Hawks? Yeah, that great book on hawks. Yeah saying because robin woods work is better known on hawks, but uh, I really really like Mast's book on hawks. That's my view too. I mean, I like I like the woods, but but I the mast is my favorite Yeah, I really like that book and I'd you know Yeah, I'd like to I've thought a lot about trying to do a class. I wrote a western Novel that actually has a a kind of You know real bravo slant in it in the sense that you know hawks made real bravo as a kind of response to high noon He didn't like the sort of Isolated hero that everyone abandons who has to then fight the bad guys all by his lonesome Uh, hawks wasn't a fan of that and so in real bravo, as you know, John Wayne can't get people to stop helping him Everybody keeps helping him all the time And the the novel that I wrote has something of that structure in it. The the the opening of the book You know has the this kind of plays with the sort of lone western hero against an empty horizon and then slowly But surely the horizon gets populated and other people come into the story and It ends much more in a hawk's place than in the place of high noon Yeah, I already have those are a column and mass takes a number of hawks's films to be sort of in a way replies to earlier films So it's a way that the big sleep replies to the Maltese falcon or to have have not replies to You know to Casablanca in a sense that certain kinds of certain kinds of conflicts like conflicts between Love and work or between love and Duty and so forth that are central to those Are central to the earlier ones. He wants to challenge and so although there's there's a clear You know echoing of the earlier movies, you know the part of the reason the hawks movies and happily where those ones uh and not so happily is that he's um uh You know, he's trying to try to rethink these this connection in such a way as to make it more of a you know Not not believing in the deep conflicts. Yeah, I think that's right And there's that there's that great line about William James that he was You know afraid to draw a distinction for fear it would become a dualism I don't think that's quite hawks, but I do think hawks saw something dualistic in a lot of these earlier films And you know dualistic in something like, you know, the the true pejorative sense of that term that The sense of dualism where it becomes impossible to explain The relationship between the two things, you know, thus distinguished in the dualism And I think that much of what hawks does is attempts to show that those dualisms are A product of a certain kind of fantasy In the earlier films or a certain kind of misguided thinking at any rate. They're imposed On the characters in a way that's it's not realistic And so yeah, I think he's often trying to show you that these things While not perhaps always easy to balance aren't somehow Fated to be imbalanced in the way that perhaps, you know, you might think these earlier films suggest Yeah, I mean you could think it was kind of an Aristotelian approach in the sense of of you know a unity of the virtues a unity of a unity between self-interest and morality As as opposed to the view that there's you have to choose between one or the other rather If you have from Aristotle's point of view, if you have to choose between self-interest and morality you've reconceived You've misconceived Yes, one or the other or both because you're uh, you know because uh On the one hand morality requires sort of a proper self-regard. On the other hand proper Virtue means functioning as a human being not just as Organism and being a human being involves a kind of engagement with reason and virtue and so on Yeah, there's that great line of of samuel johnson's where he says, you know Striving the highest of human felicities is striving and conquering second best is striving deserving to conquer Um, I think part of what hawks is so interested in is the way in which this this sort of dualisms in these earlier films In a sense invalidate the striving of the characters You know, there's no there's nowhere for them to go. No nothing nothing to conquer no achievement to To make and I think he's trying to reconceive these things so that there is scope for human achievement You know where these things are concerned or striving need not always be A failure. Yeah, I mean this you know Casablanca has a little bit more hope at the end than Uh, the nullities falcon does because at least you know, he's he's got his he has beautiful friendship fighting the nazis with quadrains And so that you know, there's he's got a he's got a worthwhile project to his You know, he's going to be enjoying and be Good at yeah, and it's important that he you know, he ends that film so to speak Deserving a big rimber, but even if he doesn't get to have her Yeah, of course, you always wonder what happens after the war is over because The main reason for going off is he's so good Her husband's gonna be so important to the war effort and he's not going to be good for the war effort unless he has his Ingrid Bergman, but um, you know It was only a few years later the war was over and I wonder how how that marriage would have survived You know, this is a crucial, you know, that kind of thing is a crucial moment for instance in In austin novels, you know in all the novels The I think in all the novels. It's true that the heroine comes to a point where she thinks that She simply can't have her choice That it's done and finished It turns out Always that she does get her choice But it's crucial to see that that moment occurs in the story because to to think of austin's endings is simply Happy endings is to miss that moment where the character fully recognizes And acknowledges that however the story is about what she deserves. She isn't going to get it And you know her willingness to sort of accept that is always preludial to whatever chance event Like lucy still proving to be Every bit as superficial as you would have thought in sense and sensibility and so shifting heroes brothers And so elinor gets to marry edward afterall Yeah, all that happens But it's crucial that before that elinor is schooling herself to resignation You know, and that's I think a really important piece of what you have to recognize. You know, appreciate what austin's doing Yeah, because all will be you know, although in the Aristotelian view or the Hoxian view, you know Uh, you know, there is a possibility of recognizing these things that doesn't mean that People always get what they deserve Or that they always get the merited results of there. No, that's right It's that complexity that you just named that you know is motivating Hox in many ways And Hox knows what's causing these prior films to think about things in the way that they do But you know, but they want to take this All or nothing kind of View of things and Hox ideas. No, I mean sometimes, you know Things don't work out, but sometimes they do You know, it's not fated that they won't and sometimes they don't because you hadn't thought creatively enough about how they might Right. Yeah. Yeah, you know, you haven't striven in the right way Well, we should probably start right do it good to wrap up now because An hour and a half is about the limit to which my system can handle a long video before it just takes forever to to process But this has been really fun. Maybe we can do it, you know, again sometime. Yeah, any any final Thoughts No, no, I appreciate you having me on as you said it was a lot of fun All this pandemic stuff. I haven't gotten to talk to you in a long time. So yeah for me Despite the fact that there will be an audience. It was just good to good to chat with you again. Yeah. No, me too Um, and we could almost chat sometime without an audience online True. I I've got to get over my sort of zoom phobia Yeah, but that's true, but you know, but I suspect uh You know, I suppose I suspect a number of our of my viewers will be We'll enjoy this even if the you know, those follow all the details of Frager's three Frager's three principles are the apathetic theology. I think people We'll find it engaging and we might like a Happy performance. Anyway, so thanks a lot I often forget to thank people at the end of these videos not out of gratitude. We're just out of you know focusing on the uh, you know on the mechanics of Of uh, something recording. So I remember thank you for coming on and respectively, thank you to everyone else I interviewed that I forgot to thank at the end of the Of their videos, but I'm grateful to them too Uh, and uh Um And to my viewers, uh, if you enjoyed this and want to see more like share subscribe all that good stuff and Uh, see you next time