Factually! with Adam Conover - The World Philosophy Made with Scott Soames

Episode Date: February 5, 2020

Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southern California, Scott Soames, joins Adam this week to for a deep dive into how philosophy shaped the modern world, the relationship between philosophy and physics, and the age old question: “What are numbers?" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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and one of my earliest memories is riding the school bus, looking out the window, and wondering, why is my mind in this body? I mean, look, to be fair, my mind went a lot of weird places during those days. Sometimes, instead of asking that question, I would imagine that I had an ultra-thin, infinitely long knife that I could hold out from the bus window. And as we drove down the road, everything we passed was silently and effortlessly cut in half, toppling over behind us like a Dumber Yina Samurai movie. I mean, I was a weird kid, okay? But look, getting back on track, that question, why is my mind in this body? I puzzled over it endlessly. Like I was aware, even at that young age, that my conscious experience, this continuous feeling of being me, was produced by my brain, by the piece of meat residing inside my skull. But also I was aware that there were billions and billions of other humans with billions and billions of their own

skull meats out there. So why did my consciousness arise in between this set of ears on Long Island, New York in the mid-90s, as opposed to any other skull at any other time. Now, the adults of my life didn't have a lot of patience for these questions. They figured it was trivial navel-gazing, the kind of thing privileged kids do in between rounds of Mario Brothers and learning to masturbate. And they weren't wrong, but they were like, Adam, why are you questioning this? Just accept it. That's all you need to do. But I couldn't. The question was vital for me. One of the fundamental facts of my existence on earth didn't make sense to me, and I demanded to know the answer to it. So years later, I went to college, and while I was there,

I stumbled into a philosophy class. I literally took the class by accident. The boring-ass theater class I thought I wanted to take was full, and so I signed up for Philosophy 101 completely on a whim, and that class changed the course of my life because suddenly I discovered there was a field where people were actually trying to answer questions like the one I had asked. Not just any questions, the biggest and most important questions like what do we really know for certain? What is justice? How should we organize our society? Why don't girls like me? Okay, philosophy didn't help me out with that burning 17-year-old question, but the rest were all there.

And most importantly, we didn't just talk about these questions. The philosophers we read felt like they were actually making progress answering them. So I majored in philosophy. And still, adults in my life were skeptical. They were like, philosophy, huh? What are you gonna do with that degree?

They'd snicker. And I was like, I don't know. How about I'll be a philosopher? That was my literal plan. I wanted to go to grad school, get a professorship, and then spend the rest of my life doing philosophy. Now, since you're listening to this podcast, I think you can conclude that that didn't happen. And you know what? Thank God it didn't, because I graduated college in 2004, which means that if I had gone to grad school, I would have come out the other end in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, the worst job market of the last many decades, with a graduate degree in philosophy. It probably would not have gone great for me. Instead of going to grad school, though, I went into comedy. And that was bittersweet for me, giving

up one dream in pursuit of another. But I had this feeling in the back of my mind, even as I did so, that comedy was just another way of doing philosophy. Because what philosophy and comedy have in common is that they never stop asking questions. They never stop undermining what the rest of the world takes for granted, asking, wait, are we really sure about this? And then both of them provide new possible answers to those questions and undermine those answers in turn. See, studying philosophy taught me how to think questioningly and deeply. And what is comedy but questioning in that way and then adding jokes. As a result, my training in this field that

everyone told me was for ivory tower space cadets with thumbs up their butts turned out to be the perfect training for my actual career, bizarrely. But I still go back sometimes to that question I asked on the bus. Why is my mind in this body? Because after four years of studying the problem of consciousness, that's what I focused on in college, studying that problem, and then another 20 years of thinking about it still, I still don't have an answer to that question. Philosophy has helped me ask the question better, but I'm not always sure that I'm closer to an answer. And philosophy is a weird field in that way. The question of what it is, what it does, and what it contributes to our society is not always an easy one to answer. Well, that is what our guest today on the show is going to try to do for us. His name is Scott

Soames. He's a professor at USC, and he's the author of the book, The World Philosophy Made. I hope you enjoy this interview. Let's get going with Scott Soames. Scott, thank you so much for being here. Thank you. So you wrote a book called The World Philosophy Made. Yes. You're a philosophy professor at? USC. At USC. Tell me just, this is going to sound like too basic of a question, but what is philosophy? Well, of a question. But what is philosophy? Well... Off to the races already. This is something that tends to stump everybody. And the thing I like to say to people, and it's really the theme of the book, is that philosophy isn't a single isolated discipline. It's really the partner of all intellectually advancing enterprises. So,

at different times, at different places, at different stages of philosophy, it's got its fingers in physics or economics or religion or psychology or any number of things, logic. And now, when we have advances, advanced states of many disciplines, philosophers are branching out more and more. And I really want to devise programs so that my students are philosophically grounded, but they're touching the other aspects of intellectual life that they're most interested in and getting to the bottom of it. So that's a big difference between the way a lot of people think of philosophy, because a lot of folks think of philosophy as someone up the classical ivory tower or the head in the clouds. And, you know, you're building castles in the air, right? Is that enough metaphors for one sentence? Yeah, that'll do. I got it.

That it's not connected to the real world, that it's way out there, way up high. Yeah, well, that's why I chose the title, The World Philosophy Made. Of course, it didn't make it by itself. But philosophy made huge contributions to the real world, and it's still doing it. So what are some of those? Well, what are some of those? Let's start with one. You go back to the first European university and the ideal of a liberal education.

Where did it come from? It came from Plato's Academy. And what Plato did, do you think he just had them sit around and talk philosophy all day? No. Above his doors, it says, let no one innocent of geometry enter here. So, he taught mathematics. They taught the measurements of the stars. They taught all sorts of things.

And the last thing they taught was philosophy, which would bring it all together. So, that's one of the main things that got started. But Plato and Socrates together put together something that had never been seen, and that is an integration of intellectual inquiry, which has two thrusts. One is the advancement of theoretical knowledge of all kinds. And the other is the investigation into living a good and virtuous life. And their point was both of these enterprises need rigorous, conceptual, logical thought proceeding in a disciplined way. And they wanted to provide the models for that. And so coming back to that question of what philosophy is, is it that model, that framework for investigating those questions, is that what distinguishes philosophy from other fields, or was that the contribution it made at that moment?

I guess it is something about a mode of inquiry. inquiry. And one thing, there's a couple of things that I also add to this, and that is philosophy never makes progress against a background of rank ignorance. Philosophy tends to make progress when some good things are happening either in mathematics or science or some other domain, and results are coming in, but then problems come up like, how do we deal with this? We don't know how to deal with it. And philosophers come in and they say, well, why don't you think of conceptualizing it this way rather than the way you've been? Oh, all of a sudden results flow in, knowledge develops, the science or the discipline advances greatly. But then after time goes on, in any field, we reach the edges again, where what you had given us before is now kind of blurring into uncertainty.

1834 is now kind of blurring into uncertainty. Philosophers try to jump back in and try to help the practitioners, the mathematicians have found, but what does it mean and what do we do with it? And what are its limitations? Are there limitations to this particular area of inquiry? And if so, how do we find them? Yeah. It's interesting the relationships that those different fields have with philosophy. I'm struck by when I was in college, I got a bachelor's in philosophy.

I wrote a senior thesis for my school, which was a little, it's like a dissertation for undergrads. I know. Where did you go to school? I went to Bard College. Okay. And we did a senior project at the end. I wrote it on philosophy of mind, on cognitive philosophy. Yes. And it was a very exciting field in the early 2000s, still is, I'm sure. Because there's all these psychologists studying what consciousness is, how consciousness works,

and how the brain works, and bumping into all of these questions that are fundamentally philosophical. Because as they're studying them, they can't help but ask the question, well, wait, how does, what is the relationship between the piece of meat that I'm studying, the behavior of the organism I'm studying, and then the experience of being it, right, of consciousness itself? There's like a, it naturally runs in there. And as a result, there are many philosophers, Daniel Dennett and David Chalmers and others, who were in dialogue with neuroscience, with cognitive psychology. But then it strikes me that there's other fields, like physics, I feel like asks as many questions, but you don't see as many

philosophers in there getting juicy with the physicists, at least in my experience. You know, there are. A friend of mine at Princeton, I spent 24 years in the philosophy department at Princeton. He is a philosopher of physics. He works in a more mathematical end of physics than David Wallace does. But he goes every year to Oxford to interact with the physicists. While at the same time, teaching courses back at Princeton at Philosophical Logic and Philosophy of Science. And so are there times when physicists who are reading him

or these folks have an insight because of some philosophical work that was done and said, oh, we should go about our physics a little bit differently? I'll say two things. There's a very well-known philosopher of physics. I think it's right around his birthday right now. He's still teaching at Columbia, David Albert. Happy birthday to David Albert. And he's had an enormous number of citations from physicists in top physics journals for his way of conceptualizing things.

The other thing I want to say, if you look back at what Einstein was saying between, say, 1905 when we got special relativity and 1920 general relativity, and then he wrote an intellectual autobiography. And he talked about three philosophers that meant a lot to him. One was David Hume. One was Ernst Mach, who was both a philosopher and a scientist in around the 1920s. And the other is Moritz Schlich, who chaired the Vienna Circle. And what Einstein was really saying, especially about Hume, which was the one he admired the most, it's not that Hume taught him physics. It's not even that Hume taught him any science. science. It's that Hume taught him something, namely, that we can take ordinary common sense notions like the self, like necessary connection, like causation, figure out new ways of thinking of them that tip over their normal presuppositions.

And they may at first seem unnatural to us, but although they're well-suited to describing our day-to-day life, the way we evolved, when you're trying to come up with theories of the cosmos, the things that are very well suited for a small scale may not be very well suited for the biggest scale. Right. And that's what he was saying. He was so grateful that that helped him think and have the courage to reconceptualize our notions of space and time.

I see, because Einstein's conclusions were so deeply counterintuitive. And sort of all post-Einstein physics is the kind of thing where it's so hard to wrap your head around. That's right. It's so counterintuitive to our normal understanding. And having philosophies, those philosophers pushing into those categories and making us question

what they are and unpacking them has helped him to think in that way. Yeah, you know, I have a big, long chapter, maybe the longest chapter in the book. It's on the relationship between philosophy and physics, and it includes Newton and it includes Einstein. It includes quantum mechanics and people like that. And people like that. Now, of course, I'm not a philosopher of physics, so I'm kind of consuming this and putting my understanding of it out there for others. But I've had people look at it, and they seem to think it's pretty accurate.

I love that's the academic method distilled down into a nutshell. I had some other people look at it, and they said it's good. And that's the most we can say about it. Yeah. Is that it's survived peer review this far. What are some other fields that, you know, folks think of as being, oh, these are concrete, hard science or, you know, let's take it away from hard science, you know, more practical fields that philosophy has deeply influenced that you write about. How about digital technology? Yeah.

How was that influenced by philosophy? I can't imagine how, so I can't wait for you to tell me. It came from philosophy. There was a development. It started in 1879 by a German mathematician philosopher named Gottlieb Frege. And he had an idea about mathematics. His idea, he had a question. He had two questions.

What are numbers? That's a classic philosophical question is what are numbers? What the fuck are numbers? Yeah. You talk about the number six. I mean, we know a lot about six, but if you ask somebody, what is the number six anyway? Yeah, they can point to it.

They can say, well, there's six or something there. They know it's, you know, three plus three. Yeah. They know stuff like that. But what is quantity? What is this thing? Yeah. That was one of his questions.

Okay. Small stuff. The other question is, what's the nature of mathematical knowledge? How do we come to it? So what's his idea? nature of mathematical knowledge. How do we come to it? So what's his idea?

His idea was that numbers are whatever they have to be in order to allow us to explain our knowledge of them. So then he had an idea of how to explain our knowledge of them. And the thought was this. He developed the most powerful system of symbolic logic that had been ever in existence until then. That was strong enough to do the work he wanted to do with looks like math, but it's how you do almost computations about logical statements. It's how you deal with, how you formulate logical statements, prove or disprove logical statements about any subject matter whatsoever. If A, then B. That's part of it, yes.

That sort of thing. Yeah. So he figured out a more powerful system, a way to do it. In the 1930s, people took Frege's system of logic and they proved certain results about it. They defined mathematical, they defined logical consequence in a way that you could study it outside the system. logical consequence in a way that you could study it outside the system. This system is going to give you certain logical consequences, but you're going to have a way of standing outside the system and looking at it in a precise way and showing that everything that satisfies the definition of proof in the system really is a logical consequence. This then led a couple of these logician philosophers

to definitions of a computable function. A function which is such that it's defined over a domain of arguments, and it's a computable function if whenever you give the function an argument, there's one single routine such that whenever you give the function an argument, there's one single routine such that whenever you give the function an argument, if you let it work long enough, it'll always tell you correctly, yes, this is the value or, and no, that's not the value.

This is a concept I learned in computer programming in school of a function, you give it an argument, it comes out with a result. Yeah. Okay, so this guy comes along, Alan Turing. I wondered if you were going to say his name. I mean, yeah, that brings the threads together.

Please, go on. So Alan Turing developed a way of, a very simple way of doing this, which had this, just by operating on ones and zeros. What's one and zero? That's just a model of either a closed or an open electronic circuit. Yeah. So he showed anything that could be computed in any other way

by any of the other models could be computed this way. Yeah. And we've never found a counterexample. He created the Turing machine, correct? The Turing machine was not really a machine. It was a set of abstract instructions for the operation of what was initially an imaginary machine. Yeah. He was working on that in Europe.

This philosopher logician at Princeton, Alonzo Church, they had converged on a similar result. So Turing comes over and in two years does a PhD with Church in the mid-30s. Church gives Turing's method the name Turing machine. And then the whole digital revolution took off. So Frege is studying arithmetic. What is a number? He comes up, I want to see if I can condense it all down and see if I got it right. He comes up with like a formalized, reduced version of, this is what a number is, this is what a logical statement is. These are these very short proofs.

Well, they were sometimes long proofs. Okay. But from very few axioms. Yes. So he reduces it down. And then other philosophers developed this idea of a computable function. Turing reduces that further to ones and zeros via the Turing machine. And what's so cool about that?

And then every computer we have is based. Electricity goes at the speed of light. Yeah. And then every computer we have is based. Electricity goes at the speed of light. Yeah. So even if the proof might be, in principle, a thousand steps long, bang. Once you've got the digital model, and then once you've implemented it electronically, it's done in an instant. It's instantaneous.

Yeah. And so that leads to, I mean, every computer we have now is a Turing machine. Your phone, your computer, whatever. Incredible. I actually, so I knew the story of the Turing machine. And the Turing machine is the coolest thing. It's a theoretical computer that proves that it is functionally identical to any computer that you could build. Yeah, there's a universal Turing machine.

Yeah, there's a universal. You could, I think the universal Turing machine. Yeah, there's a universal, you could, I think the universal Turing machine just reads ones and zeros off a strip and goes back and forth. And it might take a long time, but that can do the same computational work as the iPhone in your pocket or the supercomputer at NASA.

And the Turing machine evolved from the work of Frege. Initially, yes. Wow. I actually had no idea. Frege, Russell, Zermelo, Frankl, Kurt Gödel, Alonzo Church, Alfred Tarski, Alan Turing. Wow. And we studied them in philosophy, all of them. I only studied some of them.

I mean, I only studied for four years. So I was like, oh, I've heard of Frege. I've heard of Gödel. But, you know, you only studied for four years. So I was like, oh, I've heard of Frege. I've heard of Gödel. But, you know, you only have so much time. It's like we did, you know, you spend a whole year on Kant, and then you graduate, and you enter the rest of the world. There's a ton of stuff in philosophy. We've just been talking about a few things. Yeah.

We could go back to Newton's time. We could go back to Galileo's time. We could do all of this. time, we could go back to Galileo's time, we could do all of this. And we could do other things in contemporary time, like Adam Smith, and economics, and Frank Ramsey, subjective decision theory, which has now been integrated into economics. What we need, and what universities need, What we need and what universities need is, yes, we should have philosophy departments, but they should offer different paths for different students. So some of them are connecting more with math and logic. Some of them are connecting more with philosophy, politics, and economics. Some of them are connecting more with law and language and philosophy.

And there's a ton going on there. Yeah. And some are connecting with cognition and neuroscience. Oh, and ethics. Oh, yes, definitely in ethics. I mean, it's striking because there are some fields that it seems like philosophy is so immediately vital for. I mean, ethics is the one field that I understand. There are ethicists who are paid by hospitals, right?

There certainly are. In order to figure out, hey, when is it okay to pull the plug? When is it okay to, or just that sort of question. Unfortunately, they're very concerned about that because it costs them a lot of money. Yeah. And that's a question where you do kind of need to ask a philosopher of what is ethical and what is not. There is really nobody else who specializes in that question. Yes, that's true.

I remember taking a philosophy of art class from my professor, a wonderful professor, Gary Hagberg of Bard, who was, it made me think about art so differently for the rest of my life, right? I'm like, everybody who is involved in the art world should take this, because like, if we care about art at all, then asking the question, what is it? What do we mean when we say this? Is one of the most vital questions to be able to answer, at least for yourself. You know, I'd like to hear, this is probably not what you want to do, but I'd like to hear more about what conclusions you came to, because that's an area that I myself haven't gotten into that much. Yeah.

Well, it's interesting because, you know, I took the class 20 years ago and I've come to my own conclusions since. And, you know, I don't want to like put words into, uh, professor Agberg's mouth or et cetera, but, um, there are, you know, I think what I came away with is that, you know, I entered the class with, uh, this idea that art is what other people tell me that it is, you know, that it's, uh, they're the art world folks and there's the price that's set and there's what's up in the gallery. Right. And there's so many, once you start investigating, okay, but what is it really?

There's so many different ways to look at it, right? Like one of the things that he emphasized was, I remember very distinctly in the class talking about, like art is one of the only things that we worship culturally, that we put it into a special room, like a cathedral, and we go look at it, nobody can touch it, right? And that's a very special thing. But we, and this is me talking now, we make the choice of what's in that room, right? And so, is there a level on which like art simply is the thing that we choose to put in the room, you know, that is that active act of appreciation, right? But then you can, of course, find counterexamples of, you know, that doesn't mean that every person can unilaterally choose what is and is not art because they don't understand. There's art that I've learned to understand.

What you're saying is what really makes art is a response that it calls forth from those who are exposed to it. And when that becomes powerful enough and significant enough for those people, then a kind of social value is placed on it, and it comes to be seen as something that plays a role in helping you understand your life. Yeah. And I've started to feel, again, this is not from the class, it's my own observation, but I've started to think of humans as beauty-recognizing creatures, that we simply move through the world and we go, oh, I love that.

Or, you know, if you, you know, there's this great comic strip by this guy, XKCD, and there's a comic strip was like, look, if you put people in a room and kept them there for 10 years with just photos of Joe Biden eating a ham sandwich, they would develop preferences of which photo they like better. They'd be like, you know what? The mayonnaise really glistens nicely off his lip in that one, right? That's just how we are, right? And so that engine ends up being for me

what creates art, right? That like, yes, there's an artist who's creating something and that person has a big influence on it as well. But also the lofting of something up is something that we naturally do as humans, according, and now why do we do that? That's an entirely different question to ask, right? But there is a push and pull between the two groups. And if you're not asking those questions, if you're in the art world and you're not asking those questions, or if you don't have a, at least an opinion about them, what are you even doing? And so in that way,

I remember taking that class and being like, cause there's so many people at the school, it's a liberal arts school. So many people, you know, who are doing art history or, or who are taking art classes. And I was like, you need to be taking this class because this is so vital to what you are doing, to what you want to do in your career. And there are so many, it seems like there are so many fields like that that philosophy touches. You know, as you were talking, I was making a connection between what you were saying and something else that I have become very interested in, in philosophy in the last decade. have become very interested in philosophy in the last decade. And that is, we were talking just now about art and what makes something art.

I have become interested in law and what makes something law. And you might say in the case of art, well, you know, some people get to decide to put stuff in a room and then other people go into the room and they behave a certain way. But of course, that's a very superficial description of what's going on. And you might say in the case of law, well, there are these authorities and they have procedures that they follow and they issue, a lot of what they issue are requirements, obligations, in a way, you could almost think of them as commands that are backed by force. And the rest of the population then behaves in a certain way because they don't want the force imposed on them. Yeah, it's functionally that's what's happening. But that's only, that's true, but it's also superficial.

In the sense that you talked about elevation, you talked about what good works of art do for the people who view them. good works of art do for the people who view them. It makes them aware of some aspect of their cognition, their life, their perception. And it makes them aware of a value, which is probably really already there. And it strengthens that value. And it allows you to generalize it to other things. And so when you get deeply involved in art, you get more deeply involved with fundamental aspects of the human experience. Yes. Law is more than a set of commands backed by force. Yeah.

This is an example that's used by a legal philosopher, H. L. A. Hart, probably the greatest legal philosopher in the 20th century. And he argues this. It goes kind of like this. Suppose you're walking down the street and a robber comes up and got a gun and demands your money or your life. That's a command backed by force. You might give him the money and you might say later, well, I had no choice. I was obliged to do so.

What you wouldn't say was that you were obligated to do so or that you had an obligation. Yes, or a responsibility. They are regarded in general, not every law, but in general, as something more than commands backed by force. They are regarded with a degree of respect and appreciation, and they are accompanied by a sense of at least prima facie obligation. That's almost the difference between a legitimate and an illegitimate system of laws. An illegitimate system of laws by a tyrant, people will obey because they're forced to, but they'll grumble about it and they'll say this is unjust. And then you start looking into what this elevation amounts to.

Why are people responding this way? And there are a variety of reasons. I mean, one is you might, first of all, you think it imposes a system of social cooperation and we have to have some system of social cooperation because uncoordinated activity is going to be chaos. If no one was coordinating anything. Nobody's going to do anything. Yeah. But then how things are coordinated. They've got to be reasonably for the benefit of large parts of the population. Yeah. They've got to satisfy some moral basics of people in the population or else their allegiance is going to be very weak.

Yeah. Or else their allegiance is going to be very weak. Yeah. And in the best legal systems, there must be a degree of participation on the part of the populace. Now you start building these things out. And then you look at our contemporary systems. You look at the difference between representational systems and non-representational systems, those with written constitutions, those without written constitution. And then you can start looking at contemporary events.

You look at the United States. You look at, say, we have all these disputes over the Supreme Court now. And we have been for a few decades. Why is this? What exactly is the function? What should it be? What would it be if our system was as healthy as it ought to be? And what is the role of the Constitution in all that? This is a big set of questions that's being being investigated and pushed by both philosophers and some legal, some law professors at various places. And that means that when we're coming up with a system of laws, the actual practical act of coming up with a system of laws is a philosophical investigation. That's what the founders of the country were doing when they were writing the Constitution. They were like, well, what should a Constitution be? And what should spring from it? And why do laws have legitimacy? It's fundamentally...

All of those questions were on the table. They were looking at their own experience in the hundred or more years of the colonial times, but they were also looking at John Locke's theory of government. They were looking at, to a degree, Adam Smith and David Hume's contributions. And there was this guy. Who was this guy? This guy who was the president of Princeton. His name was John Witherspoon. The actor? No.

No. So he comes over, I think the late, you know, maybe mid-1760s. He comes over, takes a job as president of Princeton. He's himself part of the Scottish Enlightenment. He was part of the same circle as Adam Smith, Hume, Francis Hutchison, all the Scottish Enlightenment figure, Thomas Reed. So he's a philosopher clergyman. He comes over, becomes president of Princeton. He's the head of the philosophy department, the head of the history department, and the head of the literature department. And he has a bunch of students.

He becomes active in politics. He signs the Declaration of Independence. He has five of his students, including James Madison, are delegates at the Constitutional Convention. Three after America won its independence, three Supreme Court justices were his students. Something like 28 senators, people who became senators. Wow. 49 House representatives.

Wow. 49 House representatives. This guy spread some of the ideas, helped spread some of the ideas that are embedded in our Constitution. Wow. That were known by the founders, that were taught to them in some cases in their philosophy and history courses at institutions like Princeton. That is deep physical influence on the country as a philosopher. Yeah. Well, we have to take a really quick break.

When we get back, I want to ask you some of my darkest, most cynical questions about philosophy, and I want you to push back on them. We'll do that right after the break when we'll have with Scott Soames. So I want to play devil's advocate because I'm a lover of philosophy, but I haven't practiced it in a number of decades. in a number of decades. And, you know, philosophy has this reputation of, again, being up in a cloud and being a little bit divorced from reality. I think we've put that to bed. But, you know, when I was getting into it, I spoke about in the intro, I was really animated by the sort of philosophical questions that one has as a young man or a young person. And those are the questions that I threw myself into studying, right? One of the ones that obsessed me was the question of philosophical zombies.

I'm sure you're aware of this. It's a very fun one, right? It's the question of when we're talking about consciousness, is it possible for a being to act like a human in every way, but to not actually be conscious, to not actually have consciousness. And that's like, it's fun to think about, but it also was like a very deep question in philosophy of mind that sort of would, depending on where you fell on it, you'd go towards one conclusion or another. And it was like actively debated, et cetera, et cetera. And I came up in my senior thesis, I wrote about it. Um, I was just looking into it, um, now 20 years later, and I looked up the, uh, Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy entry on it. And it said, well, there's still no agreement

on this issue. Like after, after 20 years, right. Um, Hey, philosophy has been going on a lot longer than that. Oh, that's true. Oh, fair enough, fair enough. Short time span. But sometimes it feels as though when I'm looking at a big picture that like what defines philosophy? Is it the field that never comes to a single conclusion,

right? That all these other fields, you know, physics, et cetera, everyone more or less agrees at the end of the day, there's still some things that are working out, but, you know, they come to, okay, we've proven this or disproven it, now we're moving on.

We know ether doesn't exist. The people who still believe in ether, they're all dead. You know, no one's still carrying that torch. But that's not the case in philosophy to some extent. You can often find someone who's still pushing forward a position. And so I don't know how to think about that. And I was wondering if you could enlighten me.

We tend, when something becomes thoroughly and uncontroversially known or established, it ceases being in philosophy and we move on to the next level. Sometimes, like consciousness, well, we haven't been able to move on to the next level yet. I have the feeling we're getting closer, but in other things, we do move on and things that used to Aristotle was as much a physicist as he was a philosopher Galileo was both a physicist

and so was Kepler an astronomer that's what philosophy was at the time why are all our feet stuck on the ground and what are birds was like a philosophical question. Or what is matter made of? And that became a question for physics.

Well, that's interesting because that was going to be my follow-up question. You know, the title of Newton's treatise was, what was it? It has Principia Mathematica Philosophia Naturalis, natural philosophy. These big conceptual advances are philosophy. They don't happen every day. Right. And so once an advance is made, a fair amount of work can go on just based on that before we encounter some new paradox or uncertainty. And philosophy tends to come back in one way or another.

Sometimes as a philosopher interacting with the science, sometimes as a scientist getting some inspiration from philosophy, it comes back again, the next advance is made, it can quiet down for a while. We're always going to be coming up against the edge where we don't know anymore. So that's a really interesting way to put it because I knew this about ancient philosophers that natural philosophy is what we would call today science. it because I knew this about, you know, about ancient philosophers that, you know, natural philosophy is what we would call today science. And I was like, well, is, is once questions are solvable, do they just become, now they're in the field of science, right? Instead of philosophy. And you'd say that's a success. That's when philosophy wins is it stops being philosophy

and it starts being math or science or psychology or biology or some other field. But those never lose the frontiers. Yeah. And so they're always fair game. not working full time as a physicist or a mathematician or something like that to interact enough to be able to go out with them to the edge of the field and make a contribution. This is a challenge for us. Yeah. And in some fields, the philosophy of mathematics today, the philosophy of physics today, to some extent, the philosophy of chemistry and

biology, both of which exist today, you really, yes, by all means, study philosophy, get a degree in philosophy. You know you're going to need two degrees. You're going to need a degree in the field and in philosophy and how to think philosophically as well. Yeah. Now, like me, I'm doing some, a bit of law now. I don't have a law degree.

So I think I can make some contributions along with other people who are really in the law who I interact with. But it's not the same level of material, conceptual material that has to be mastered in order to get to the edge of the field where we're still feeling our way. But I did have, you know, I had a good friend of mine who was a fellow philosophy student, like ended up concentrating in philosophy of law, became a lawyer, and now he has that in his law life, right? Of like this basis in having thought about what are these laws and thought about these questions. And so he's able to carry those both with him in a productive way. But it strikes me that philosophy doesn't have as good a reputation as a field as some of these others, right? If you said, hey, I'm studying physics. Oh, cool. Good for you. I'm studying philosophy. Are you sure you want to do that? Right? Why do you think that is? Is that something

that have philosophers dropped the ball in the PR department? Yes. Okay, very blunt. And it's not simply in the PR department. We don't think enough. we don't think enough. What tends to happen is a fair number of us interact with one or two other outside fields, but we don't step back and we don't take a look at, well, what is our discipline as a whole? What is its relationship to other fields. And we're just interested in doing what we're doing. We're fully absorbed. And we haven't thought that we need to make this explicit. I think, and that's why I wrote the book, I think we, at the stage,

we have to make this explicit. Here's another way of putting what's going on. In the old days, philosophers like Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, Kant, Locke, these people had systems of the world, systems of reality, systems that fit humans into total reality, theories of knowledge, theories of value and morality, how it all was supposed to fit together into one whole. Yeah. That day, in my opinion, is gone. Because in order to put something that large together, you have to master too many specialized, disciplined things. There's too much knowledge for one person to put into a system in their lifetime. In John Locke's day, it was a little bit easier because there were only like a hundred rich

British dudes doing this stuff and you could read all their books. But now the mass of human knowledge is enormous. You can't do it. But don't we still need some way of approaching something like a whole? Yeah. I think we do. And I think what we need to do is think of it this way. Not one picture made by one person, but a set of overlapping pictures made by this philosopher who's interacting with people in natural science.

This one who's interacting with people in natural science, this one who's interacting with some science but mostly mathematics, this one who's doing mostly the social science with philosophy, this one concerned with law and morality. Yeah. And it's got to be such that we're not always writing to specialists. We're not always writing to people right in our areas of knowledge. Yes, we are writing to them, but we're writing to them in a way that is a little broader. Yeah.

And that will touch other people and touch other disciplines. And then they can read and they think, oh, I didn't know that area. Well, that's kind of similar to something I've been thinking about over here. Yeah. That's what I want to see philosophy become self-conscious of and evolve into. That would be wonderful. I mean, come to think of it, that's one of the things that pulled me into philosophy as a student. Because for some reason in high school, I don't remember why my mom bought me a copy of Daniel Dennett's book, Consciousness Explained, which was, I don't know why the hell she got me this book.

She saw it in a bookstore and was like, oh, I'll get that. That sounds interesting. And it was like a pop work of popular philosophy. And it was it also had an academic impact, but it was readable to me as a curious high school student. It also had an academic impact, but it was readable to me as a curious high school student. And it addressed those questions that I had of like, what is the connection between my conscious experience and the piece of meat in my skull? And it had lots of funny examples and good metaphors that I could digest and provocative ideas. And it was still a philosophically significant book. Yeah, I mean, he's good at that.

He's one of the few that really is good at that. And we need more like that. We need a lot more like that. And, you know, another thing that I'm doing is, and I started this when I was at Princeton, I'm the general editor of a series that comes from Princeton University Press, Princeton Foundations of Contemporary Philosophy. And so I'm getting authors in the various specialized fields to write in precisely the way that I'm telling you about, to explain to outsiders what it's all about, but at the same time, to be doing it in a way that insiders can recognize represents basically the highest state of our knowledge right now.

Yeah. And also introduce programs for undergraduate students and PhD students that allow them to combine their philosophy with certain other outside things and put together a package. I think that will live up to what philosophy is truly meant to be. I think so, too. Are there any – that would be a wonderful place to end, but I have one more question for you. Are there any people or movements in philosophy right now that you are especially excited about that are doing this thing that you're looking for and that you would recommend that folks go check out or try to engage with?

If folks are inspired to think more philosophically from this interview, what should they go investigate? There are more programs now at different universities that are like the ones we have. Many universities now have not just a regular philosophy major, but philosophy, politics, and law put together. And philosophy, politics, and economics put together. Philosophy and cognitive science. and economics put together, philosophy and cognitive science.

Yeah. This is, I think, a trend that is developing. And it really, in my opinion, and there's some law in philosophy too. In my opinion, it has to if we're going to be true to our calling and if we're going to really make progress. And if we're able to do this, then somebody will be sitting here in your studio 15 years from now, and you will say, you know, philosophy has a really good reputation now. When somebody says they're going into philosophy, that provokes excitement. I think it should. Well, and philosophy is something that I believe everyone is interested in at root. I always think

about, this is like a cliche for me, when I go to a friend's wedding and the best man gives up to get a speech, right? And they always say, oh, dude, me and you hanging out. I remember all those late nights spent on your porch talking about philosophy, right? Those sort of questions that 19-year-olds have of like, what are we doing? It's like, what are we doing here, man? And you can make fun of that, right? It's like, but, or I think this is the stupidest example. Hey, look, these questions keep coming back to you for a reason.

Yeah. And when the, this is the dumbest example, but I remember when The Matrix, the movie The Matrix came out. And I remember taking a philosophy class after that. And everybody was so excited because it was this question, the question it raised of, you know, Descartes' evil demon. And, you know, can you trust your senses that their reality is a question that everybody has. And it is a question that philosophy can speak to. And it gave everyone that excitement. Everyone wants to know the answers to these questions

and could be engaged in it. And it's just something we have to be more in the habit of leading folks to the work. Well, the other thing is, it's just fun. Yes, it is fun. Well, I really appreciate you coming on the show today and having fun with us talking about it. Thank you for having me.

It's been a pleasure. What's the name of the book one more time? The World Philosophy Made. Go look for it. Scott Soames, I thank you for being on the show. Thank you. Well, thank you once again to Scott Soames for coming on the show. I hope you enjoyed that conversation as much as I did.

That is it for us this week on Factually. I want to thank our producer Dana Wickens, our engineer Ryan Conner, our researcher Sam Rodman, and our WK for our theme song. And that is it for us this week on Factually. Hey, follow me on Twitter at Adam Conover. You can sign up for my mailing list or check out my tour

dates at adamconover.net. Until then, we'll see you next week on Factually. Thank you so much for listening. That was a HateGum Podcast.