Wednesday, May 09, 2018

What Is It Like Interview

Cliff Sosis has interviewed me for his wonderful What Is It Like to Be a Philosopher series. For the first week, it is only available to Silver level patrons on Patreon. Next week, he'll release it more broadly.

Please consider supporting Cliff's work. Cliff's interviews knit together questions about philosophy with questions about childhood, family, hobbies, passions, formative experiences -- giving the reader a fuller sense of the whole person than one generally sees. Check out his interviews with Josh Knobe, Kwame Appiah, David Chalmers, Sally Haslanger, Peter Singer, and Kate Manne, for example.

Teaser:

In this interview Eric Schwitzgebel, professor of philosophy at University of California Riverside, and I discuss his father’s collaboration with Timothy Leary, his uncle who invented ankle monitors, pretending to be a mannequin for his father’s class, Christmas with an electric blue Buddha, his mother’s anti-theist views, being a chambermaid and skiing, writing plays, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, T.S. Eliot, Stephen Jay Gould, Stanford and Kuhn, Feyerabend and Zhuangzi, disliking analytic philosophy, moving from Deleuze and Derrida to Hume and Dretske, living in a hippy co-op, wearing a dress as a political statement, memorizing Sylvia Plath, Dretske and Dupré, the Gourmet Report, working with Elisabeth Lloyd and John Searle, the allegations against Searle, the grad culture at Berkeley, love and death, the Bay Area Philosophy of Science reading group, Peter Godfrey-Smith, Stanford School philosophy of science, Bayes or Bust?, sneaking into György Gergely’s class, Alison Gopnik’s generosity, meeting his wife via a classified ad, the job market in 97, landing a job at U.C. Riverside where he is to this day, how the department has changed and he has changed as a teacher, his class on Evil, his work on the moral behavior of ethics professors, The Splintered Mind and philosophy on the internet, his theory of jerks, Brian Weatherson, experimental philosophy, our philosophical blind spots, his writing routine and process, work-life balance, My Dinner with Andre, election night 2008 versus election night 2016, and his last meal…

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