What Is It Like to Be a Philosopher?

In this interview, Bryan Van Norden, James Monroe Taylor Chair in Philosophy at Vassar College, and Chair Professor in Philosophy in the School of Philosophy at Wuhan University, discusses his genealogy in remarkable detail, developing an interest in philosophy and Chinese culture in Latrobe Pennsylvania, the Gourman Report, how his parents responded to his decision to go to grad school for philosophy, going to Stanford to work with Nivison and learning Nivison wasn’t working on philosophy, the distinction between PHILOSOPHY of language, philosophy OF language, and philosophy of LANGUAGE, the 1991 job market, Kant’s racist revision of the history of philosophy, his first gig, encountering a charlatan, being unemployed, working at Vassar, the challenges of teaching at an R1, improving teaching evaluations, paying the bills with poker money, poker and akrasia, what East Asian philosophy has to teach Western Philosophy, the Confucian conception of family, Buddhist metaphysics, virtue lust, what’s wrong with physicalism, threatening responses to his political writing, how philosophy informs his life, the common curriculum at Yale-NUS, why philosophy is not dead, attempting to synthesize Thomistic Aristotelianism, Confucianism, Daoism, and Huayan Buddhism, 1984, Casablanca, The Room, Rick and Morty, and his last meal…

[10/02/2020, Chinese translation by Wu Wanwei here]

So, tell me a little about your family history.

The name “Van Norden” means “from Naarden,” which is a city in what is now the Netherlands. Most Van Nordens in the US are descended from Pieterese Casparszen Mabille van Naarden, who arrived in what was then known as New Amsterdam (now New York City) in the late 17th century. About a century later, one of Pieterse’s descendants, John Van Norden (1732-1810) was a private in the Revolutionary Army, but his brother Gabriel Knowles Van Norden (1737-1810) was a Loyalist, and Gabriel's son, John (named after his uncle) was an officer in a Loyalist New Jersey infantry unit. This all must have made for awkward family dinners! Like many Loyalists, Gabriel and John fled the US for Nova Scotia after the war. John later moved to Bermuda, and was mayor of St. Georges for many years. A plaque in his honor may still be found there.

Among the Van Nordens who stayed in the US, the family divided into northern and southern branches after John Van Norden's grandson, St. Luke Van Norden (1787 – 1855), moved to New Orleans, around the time of the Louisiana purchase, and then to Mississippi. The northern branch of the Van Norden family became distinguished and financially successful, particularly a trio of brothers. Thomas Langdon Van Norden (1837-1895) received an MD from the University of the City of New York (now known as New York University) in 1859. He served as a surgeon with the Union Army during the Civil War. After the war, he and his wife became missionaries in Persia, where they died.

Thomas's brother, Warner Van Norden (1841-1914), became very wealthy during the war (I assume through profiteering), and founded the Van Norden Trust Company. With his newfound fortune, Warner renovated an existing building, which became the "Van Norden Family Mansion." It still exists (although no longer owned by anyone in the family) at No. 8, East 62nd Street, Manhattan. It was last sold in 2007 for $35 million.

Warner Van Norden also had noteworthy offspring. His son, Warner Montaigne Van Norden, was an early opponent of anti-Chinese bigotry and wrote Who's Who of the Chinese in New York to showcase the achievements of Chinese Americans. He was also an amateur Sinologist, who visited China and made a fortune importing Chinese tea. Warner had charmingly eccentric hobbies. He bought a champion French Bulldog for a record price, and imported a species of zebra from Africa, which he hoped to domesticate as farm animals.

Warner Montaigne’s sister, Emma Van Norden (1871-1906), was equally strong-willed. As an upper-class debutante she was expected to live a life of leisure and marry an equally distinguished man. Instead, she joined the Salvation Army, an action considered so déclassé that it was reported with shock in the society page of The New York Times. An official of the Salvation Army explained defensively that Miss Van Norden “was simply a good young woman who had joined the army on the same footing as any other girl less fortunate in the possession of affectionate parents, plenty of money, and hosts of friends.” She spent the rest of her life taking part in the charitable work of Salvation Army.

The third brother, Rev. Charles E. Van Norden (1843-1913), was valedictorian of his class at Hamilton College and elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He also received his LL.D from Hamilton, then studied theology at Union Theological Seminary, and was later awarded a D.D by New York University. He went on to become a Congregationalist minister, president of Elmira College, and an author of several books, including Jesus: An Unfinished Portrait. He also wrote a short story, "A Case of Discipline" (1896), which is apparently based on his experience as president of Elmira College. Charles had three sons by his first wife, and after she passed away he remarried a woman thirty years his junior, with whom he had two daughters.

His older daughter, Linda Van Norden, earned a BA from Stanford University and a PhD from UCLA, both in English literature. She was on the faculty of the University of California at Davis for more than 25 years, and died suddenly of a heart attack shortly before her retirement. Her book, The Black Feet of the Peacock: The Color Concept "Black" from the Greeks through the Renaissance, was published posthumously.

There have not been many distinguished members of the southern branch of the Van Norden family. One member of this wing of the family died “after falling from a horse,” and a family legend is that this was once a common euphemism for being hanged as a horse thief. John Wesley Van Norden (1842-1918) served as a private in the 33rd Mississippi Infantry Regiment in the Confederate Army during the Civil War. After the war, he received a pension for injuries (a hernia) incurred during his service.

John Wesley's grandson, Charles R. Van Norden (1910-2002), was the first in the southern branch of the family to earn a bachelor's degree and a graduate degree (MBA from Northwestern University). During World War II, Charles was an officer in the Navy, and at one point managed shipping in Guam when it was the busiest seaport in the world. After the war, Charles worked as an accountant, and eventually became the Corporate Secretary of Kennametal, a company that makes specialty steel. His wife, Helen K. Van Norden (1917-1994), was the child of immigrants from Poland, and she spoke only Polish until she began grade school. However, as an adult she had no trace of a Polish accent. She was working as a stenographer when she met Charles, who was auditing the company she worked for. Helen had many friends and was known for her beauty, vivacious personality, and quick wit. Their ashes are interred at Arlington National Cemetery. Charles and Helen had five children, one of whom was me.

So, so, detailed! Why is this important, you think?

My family history has many fun anecdotes, but I think it also illustrates something important about my family, which is that it can include, even in the same generation, the most staunch conservatives and the most daring iconoclasts. My most recent book, Taking Back Philosophy, is dedicated to Warner Montaigne Van Norden, our family’s first Sinologist, and Charles E. Van Norden, our family’s first philosopher.

Where were you born?

I was born in Latrobe, a small town in western Pennsylvania near Pittsburgh. The population was at its historical peak, about 12,000 people, when I was born. (It’s now down to about 8,000.) Latrobe is 99% white and about 99% Christian. For the last three years, I lived in Singapore, a city state in Southeast Asia with a population of 5.6 million. Singapore is 76% Chinese, 15% Malay, 7% Indian, and 2% “other,” with the major religions being Buddhism, Daoism, Islam, Christianity, and Hinduism. So I guess I’ve come a long way.

What’s it like growing up in Latrobe?

In many ways I had the classic American small-town experience. There was very little crime back then, and most people were very nice. I knew lots of people who owned guns. Every year in the fall there was an un-ironic announcement on the school PA system, reminding teachers that a note from parents stating “First day of deer hunting season” was not considered a valid excuse for missing school. I never hunted myself, but I do have a photo of me posing with a neighbor’s rifle and deer carcass—when I was five!

What was your family like?

I always knew that my parents loved me, and that they always made me believe that I could do anything that I wanted.

My father was chairman of the Republican Party in our county. Senator Barry Goldwater, the GOP nominee for President who lost to Lyndon Johnson, was his hero. My siblings are also Republicans, so I think I was prepared, both by instinct and upbringing, to be a conservative. I loved Firing Line, the talk show with conservative icon William F. Buckley, and I read admiringly Milton Friedman, Nobel laureate and advocate of laissez faire economics. I was raised a Catholic and was very pious when I was young. I also came to political consciousness during the Carter administration, which was not a particularly inspiring time for progressives. Combine all this with my natural instinct to, as Confucius said, “have faith in and love the ancients,” and I should have become a staunch conservative. However, the Republican Party keeps driving me to the left. Since I was in high school, the GOP has elected a B-movie actor, a C-student, and now a D-list game-show host as President. The more you learn about each of them, the more you realize what a complete disaster each of their presidencies has been, and how they have abandoned everything the Republican Party used to stand for. (George H. W. Bush was a temporary throwback to an earlier era of responsible conservatives.)

What were you into as a kid?

I was a pretentious kid, so I decided to read a book about philosophy. I think I just wanted to be able to spout off philosophical terms. I went to the bookstore at the mall and found this book, Understanding Philosophy by James K. Feibleman. The back cover blurb said something like, “James K. Feibleman may wake up some day to discover that he is the most important philosopher in the United States!” I took this at face value, so I bought the book. Now, I know from having read David Lewis that there are alternative possible worlds in which James K. Feibleman is the most important philosopher in the United States. I can only assume these are universes in which all the other philosophers are dead, because that was not a good book. Having read it, I concluded that philosophy is bullshit.

Then in high school I got involved in interscholastic competition with the National Forensics League (now the National Speech & Debate Association). Since I am a natural ham, I was pretty good at it. I also enjoyed walking around in a three-piece suit. I won the Pennsylvania state championship in extemporaneous speaking and I attended the national tournament twice. One hot debate topic was registration for the draft, which the government had recently re-instituted. It was just registration, not the draft itself, but it caused a lot of heated discussion about whether there should be a draft, whether women should also be drafted, and whether one has an obligation to go if drafted. I realized that I didn’t have any framework for thinking about the obligation of the individual to the state. I started to read philosophy again, and this time it was fascinating, because the issues mattered to me. Consequently, I always try to convey to my own students why the issues we study are important to their lives, and not just of abstract theoretical interest.

Another factor that was important for my eventual career choice was the China-craze in the US. Nixon visited China in 1972 to renormalized relations with the People’s Republic of China, and Mao died in 1976, allowing for the liberalization and opening up of China under Deng Xiaoping. In addition, Bruce Lee’s film Enter the Dragon in 1973 started the kung-fu craze in the US. (I later studied aikido, boxing, and Brazilian jiu-jitsu, but not kung-fu.) I got swept up in this Sinophilia, and I even taught myself a little Chinese: ménkǒu yǒu rén. That means, “there is someone at the door.” I have never had occasion to actually use that sentence once in my life.

Friends?

Well, one of my closest friends from high school also got a doctorate in philosophy (from a different school) and teaches philosophy today. We haven’t kept in touch, but judging from Facebook he has a lovely family and also has published award-winning poetry.

Three of my other former friends from high school had less pleasant futures. One opened a for-profit medical school in the Caribbean that was forced to close after complaints of “unsafe conditions” and “improper treatment of cadavers.” Another former friend became a private detective and was later arrested for kidnapping in connection with “helping” a client with a child-custody dispute. A third former friend killed his wife and himself in a murder-suicide.

…College?

I went to the University of Pennsylvania undergraduate. It has always had a great philosophy department, and I had the honor of studying under luminaries like the historian of Greek philosophy Charles Kahn and the late James F. Ross, a metaphysician and lay Catholic theologian. I knew I wanted to major in philosophy, and my initial plan was to go on to law school, aiming for a career in public service. But I turned out to have a special talent for philosophy and a particular interest in the history of philosophy, so I decided to get a PhD in it with the plan of becoming a professor.

I’ve always been fascinated by the way that seemingly distinct philosophical issues interlock. For example, Plato’s theory of levels of Being leads to a very different ethics than does Epicurean atomism. I started out being attracted to logical positivism (which forces you in ethics into some kind of moral anti-realism), but then I quickly realized that the concepts of “evidence” and “rationality” are too subtle to formalize the way the positivists hoped. I also read Quine’s “Two Dogmas of Empiricism.” It includes one of my favorite lines in philosophy: “in point of epistemological footing the physical objects and the gods differ only in degree and not in kind. Both sorts of entities enter our conception only as cultural posits.” I also read Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which provided historical illustrations of the facts that standards of rationality change over time, and that we cannot perceive the world independently of our current concepts. This led to a period in which I was tempted by cognitive relativism, but I came to realize that Plato’s argument against it (in the Theaetetus) is devastating: cognitive relativism is basically a hypocritical way of claiming that the one objective way the world is, is that there is no one objective way the world is. Over time, I have been increasingly drawn to views, like those of Hegel and Zhang Xuecheng, that historicize rationality without reducing it to relativism, that “night in which all cows are black.”

Now, my first semester at Penn, through a complicated series of events I ended up with two openings in my schedule. As it turned out, first-year intensive Mandarin Chinese was the equivalent of two courses, so because of my previous interest in China I took it on a whim. Penn also had a strong faculty in East Asian Languages and Civilizations, and I had the honor of studying Classical Chinese with Nathan Sivin and third-year Mandarin Chinese with Victor Mair.

How did you get into Chinese philosophy? Were you contemplating grad school?

Since I was studying both philosophy and Chinese, I became curious about Chinese philosophy. I was told by a philosophy professor that there is no such thing as Chinese philosophy. I didn’t know much about Chinese philosophy at that point, honestly. Back then it was almost impossible to learn anything about it. The only secondary book I was able to find was Creel’s Chinese Thought from Confucius to Mao Tse-tung. Creel describes the philosophy of Mozi as “enlightened self-interest,” and even as an undergraduate I knew that was a conflation of ethical egoism with consequentialism. However, what little I read taught me that Chinese philosophy at least existed. I also thought, somewhat naively, that it would be easy to get a job teaching Chinese philosophy since so few people did it. Consequently, I went to the library and found the Gourman Report, a now-defunct guide to graduate programs. I checked to see which of the top-ten graduate programs in philosophy had someone who taught Chinese philosophy. There were only two at the time: the University of Michigan (where Donald Munro was) and Stanford University (where David S. Nivison was). I got accepted to both and ended up going to Stanford.

What did your parents make of your decision to go into philosophy?

I think my family was ambivalent about my decision to pursue philosophy as a career. My father once remarked ruefully, “If any of my other kids had said that they wanted to study philosophy, I would have said, ‘Not with my money!’” However, I think part of him was happy with my choice. He once said that if he could have done anything in life he would have become an English professor. I asked him why he didn’t get a PhD in English instead of an MBA. He said that he didn’t know, but I think that the real reason was that he thought PhDs were for people born rich, not people like him.

What was Nivison like?

Nivison followed an interesting professional trajectory, and one that would be impossible to replicate today (unfortunately). He was an undergraduate studying Greek and Latin at Harvard when World War II broke out. He was drafted and assigned to learn Japanese to become a code breaker. After the war he returned to Harvard, but changed his major to Chinese and went on to earn a PhD. He then went to Stanford, where he spent the rest of his academic career. His first major work was The Life and Thought of Chang Hsüeh-ch’eng, an intellectual biography of a figure who has been compared to Hegel, because of his view that history moves through a non-linear pattern, and to Vico, because of his historical hermeneutics.

Nivison struck up a friendship with Patrick Suppes, a professor of philosophy. One day, a book on Suppes’ desk caught Nivison’s eye, and he asked permission to borrow it. The book was Methods of Logic by W. V. O. Quine, one of the leading philosophers of the 20th century. Nivison was so intrigued by what he read that he asked to teach formal logic in the Philosophy Department. In the current academic environment of specialization that would be unthinkable, but Suppes agreed, and thus began Nivison’s association with the Philosophy Department at Stanford. Donald Davidson, a former student of Quine’s and another seminal 20th century philosopher, was then at Stanford, and Nivison became one of Davidson’s interlocutors. Some of Davidson’s most influential work was on the problem of weakness of will, or akrasia. This is the problem of how it is possible to know what the right thing is to do yet not do it. Some philosophers in the West, like Socrates, denied that weakness of the will is even possible, but others, like Aristotle, offer subtle accounts of the relationship between moral knowledge and motivation that explain how it could occur. Nivison realized that Chinese philosophers had wrestled with the same problem. The great Neo-Confucian philosopher Zhu Xi (1130-1200) argued that belief is a matter of degree, so someone with shallow knowledge could know, to a certain extent, what is right without doing it. One of Zhu Xi’s most incisive critics was Wang Yangming (1472-1529), whose doctrine of the “unity of knowing and acting” is a version of the view that akrasia is impossible.

Must have been awesome to work with!

Actually, when I arrived at Stanford I discovered that Nivison was no longer actively working on Chinese philosophy. Instead, he was on a quest for the Holy Grail of ancient Chinese historiography: the date of the founding of the Zhou dynasty. This is one of the most significant dates in Chinese history, because it marks the victory of a group of supposed sage-kings over a tyrant, and the start of the dynasty in which Confucius, Laozi, and the other classic Chinese philosophers lived. The traditional date of the conquest is 1122 BCE. Modern historians and archaeologists are sure that date is not accurate, but they didn’t know what the right date was.

However, Nivison and some of his students (including ones who went on to distinguished careers in Sinology, like David Pankenier and Edward Shaughnessy) had developed a theory (really, a set of competing theories) that provided evidence for an approximate date. The arguments turns on Chinese texts that state the Zhou conquest occurred a certain number of years after a conjunction of the planets. Since the conjunction is an event with a precise date, 1059 BCE, it would seem that we could use the historical texts to provide an equally precise date for the Zhou conquest. However, there are issues about ancient calendrical conventions and possible scribal errors that introduce a fudge factor into the results. Nonetheless, we can now confidently date the founding of the Zhou dynasty to a period in between 1046 and 1040 BCE.

This work is revolutionary for Chinese historiography, but for me it was disappointing to discover that the scholar I had come to Stanford to study ancient Chinese philosophy with was now interested solely in archaeoastronomy and philology. I was also frustrated by the narrow focus of the Stanford philosophy department at that time. The program was very analytic, and while I respect the analytic tradition, it was pretty hegemonic. Required courses included the philosophy of language, a metaphysics course that was basically more philosophy of language, an advanced logic course that was useful if you were interested in (you guessed it) the philosophy of language, the philosophy of science, and ethics. Even ethics frequently seemed to be done via the philosophy of language. One professor who taught ethics at Stanford earnestly explained that if you defined “bad” as “not good,” you could reduce the number of primitive terms when formalizing your ethics. A guest speaker provided a way of formalizing ethics in truth-functional logic, and in response to a question from me admitted that in his system if “you ought to help an old person cross the street” then it logically follows that you “either ought to help an old person cross the street or murder them.” These sorts of pointless formal games robbed ethics of its intrinsic interest.

More disappointments followed. It turned out that Nivison was on the verge of retirement, and would only be offering his advanced seminar on Chinese philosophy one more time—and it was scheduled opposite one of those core courses that was required of all philosophy doctoral students. I have to admit, because of my frustrations, I started to “act out” a little. For example, I posted online (this was in the early days of the internet) a parody in which Plato was interviewed by the members of the Stanford Philosophy Department, who included a philosopher named John, who studies the PHILOSOPHY of language, a second philosopher John, who studies the philosophy OF language, a third philosopher Jon, who studies the philosophy of LANGUAGE, and Dagfinn, who studies the philosophy of language…and phenomenological existentialism. (At that time, there actually were at Stanford two people named “John” who studied the philosophy of language, one named “Jon” who studied the philosophy of language, and one named “Dagfinn,” who studied analytic and Continental philosophy of language.) During the interview, the Stanford philosophers could not understand what Plato was talking about, until one of them exclaimed in frustration, “It seems like what you are doing has almost nothing to with the philosophy of language at all!” I also used to write on blackboards around the department, “Who gives a f**k who was the author of Waverley?!” (a reference to a famous example in Bertrand Russell’s theory of definite descriptions). Hmmm, looking back I wonder how I managed to graduate?

Excellent question!

I seriously considered dropping out of the doctoral program, but fortunately Nivison’s teaching responsibilities were taken over by one of his students, Philip J. Ivanhoe, who was completing a PhD in Religious Studies at the time. Ivanhoe took me under his wing and taught me everything I needed to know about reading Classical Chinese and the Chinese commentarial tradition. He now teaches in East Asian Languages and Cultures at Georgetown University, and his book Confucian Moral Self Cultivation is a classic work in the field. Lee H. Yearley, a distinguished professor in the Religious Studies Department, also “adopted” me. He was responsible for giving me a deeper understanding of the Thomistic tradition, and also pushing me to go beyond shallow readings of texts. His Mencius and Aquinas: Theories of Virtue and Conceptions of Courage, was seminal in starting the virtue ethics approach to Confucianism.

In grad school, what did you do in your spare time?

Honestly, I spent a lot of time drinking with friends, mostly other graduate students in philosophy. The lyrics to the song “My Own Worst Enemy” by Lit sound a lot like me in graduate school.

I hear you! What was your dissertation on?

It’s broadly on the philosophical psychology of the Confucian philosopher Mengzi. Honestly, I don’t think it’s very good. I don’t know if I would have given me a doctorate for writing it. In general, I think it’s important for doctoral students to remember that your dissertation doesn’t have to be brilliant. It just has to be competent. I think mine just barely squeaked by as “competent.” Maybe.

What was the job market like when you finished your dissertation?

When I graduated from Stanford in 1991, I jumped into the worst job market for academics since the Great Depression. I had a handful of interviews, including one at a place that told me if I came for an on-campus interview, I would have to sleep on one of the faculty member’s couches, because they didn’t have the budget for a hotel, and his place didn’t have a guest bedroom.

In addition, I had not realized that it is almost impossible to get a position teaching Chinese philosophy in even the best of years. At the beginning of my career I had the naïve view that all I had to do was to explain to people what Chinese philosophers said, and they would see its value and want to include it in the curriculum. Ha! As I explain in my recent book, Taking Back Philosophy: A Multicultural Manifesto, the first Europeans to encounter Chinese philosophy immediately recognized that is genuinely philosophical and quite profound, including the Jesuits who translated the sayings of Confucius under the title Confucius: The Chinese Philosopher, and Leibniz who gushed about how much more valuable Chinese ethics is than its Western counterparts. However, Kant and his later followers re-wrote the history of philosophy so that only what could be traced directly back to ancient Greece counted as philosophy. In addition, Kant was representative of many people in his era when he claimed in his lectures that Chinese, Indians, Africans, and Indigenous Americans were innately incapable of the sort of abstract thought required for philosophy. (Peter K. J. Park’s book, Africa, Asia, and the History of Philosophy, is very valuable in tracing the history of this transformation in European self-understandings of philosophy.) Almost all contemporary philosophers would reject this explicit racism, but they are implicated in it structurally, because they accept its fruit: the assumption that there simply never was any philosophy outside the tradition that goes back to Greece and Rome.

Common questions and criticisms you encounter when you argue that Western Philosophy is incomplete and racist? How do you respond to those questions and criticisms?

I have had versions of the following conversation more times than I care to remember:

ME: Have you considered teaching Chinese philosophy in your department?

COLLEAGUE: Philosophy is by definition the tradition that goes back to Greece.

ME: That is not even a good prima facie argument. What makes something philosophy is its topics and methodology, not an accident of historical association. For example, mathematics exists independently of the Anglo-European tradition, so why shouldn’t philosophy?

COLLEAGUE: Would you want to fly in a plane built with non-Western mathematics? [Note: yes, I have actually heard this “argument.”]

ME: I would ONLY fly in a plane built with non-Western mathematics. Have you heard of Arabic numerals? They’re really catching on.

COLLEAGUE: We don’t teach religious studies or the history of ideas, only genuine philosophy.

ME: What Chinese thinkers have you read that you believe are not really philosophers? Mozi? Zhuangzi? Mengzi? Xunzi? Han Feizi?

COLLEAGUE: I haven’t read any of them.

ME: If you haven’t read any of them, how do you know--

COLLEAGUE: -- but they’re all just aphorists.

ME: Heraclitus, Pascal, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein are aphorists, and they are philosophers. Besides, most Chinese thinkers do not write in aphorisms. That is a stereotype.

COLLEAGUE: But they don’t discuss the same philosophical topics in China that we do in the West.

ME: Yes, they do discuss many of the same issues, including topics in normative ethics, meta-ethics, epistemology, and metaphysics.

COLLEAGUE: If they discuss the same issues, we don’t need to read them, because they duplicate what we already have in the West. If they discuss different issues, they are talking about a different topic, so we don’t need to read them.

ME: This too is not even a good prima facie argument. If that were a good argument, it would be a reason for no one to ever read YOUR works either. Either what you write duplicates what I already think, in case why should I read it, or you are saying something different from what I say, in which case you are talking about a different topic, so why should I care?

COLLEAGUE: Maybe they discuss the same topics, but they don’t use a philosophical methodology. They don’t provide arguments.

ME: Yes, they do. I’d be happy to give you a dozen examples off the top of my head.

COLLEAGUE: Why can’t you just teach Chinese philosophy in areas studies or ethnic studies or something?

ME: Why can’t you teach Kant in the German Department or Rawls in American Studies? Why do we even need a philosophy department instead of different area studies? The answer is that Chinese philosophers should be taught in philosophy departments because they are philosophers, and philosophers use distinctive approaches to teach texts that people in language and literature or area studies departments typically do not.

COLLEAGUE: We don’t have anyone with the ability to read Chinese.

ME: At the undergraduate level, most people who teach Descartes nowadays do not read French or Latin, and most people who teach Aristotle and Plato do not read Classical Greek.

COLLEAGUE: Yes, but they are good translations available of Descartes, Aristotle, and Plato.

ME: There are good translations available of lots of Chinese philosophy. I’ve edited two translation anthologies myself.

COLLEAGUE: We can barely cover all the figures and texts in Anglo-European philosophy now. What would you have us leave out?

ME: You are nowhere near close to covering all of Anglo-European philosophy now, you never were, and you never will be. It’s always a matter of deciding priorities, and I have seen many departments will multiple specialists in the same field in Western philosophy but no one in any branch of non-Western philosophy.

COLLEAGUE: They teach Chinese philosophy in China, and we teach Western philosophy here. What’s wrong with that?

ME: Every university in China teaches Anglo-European philosophy, and Chinese philosophy, and Marxist philosophy.

COLLEAGUE: Prove it. [Note: Yes, I really got this response once, and gave the response below.]

ME: Here is an email from a professor in China confirming what I already knew from having taught in China myself: they teach both Chinese and Western philosophy in China.

COLLEAGUE: China is really racist, you know.

ME: Since you are such a fan of the Western intellectual tradition, I am sure you are aware that you have just committed the tu quoque fallacy. Yes, there is racism and ethnocentrism in every culture in the world. This is not a reason for not fighting against it.

COLLEAGUE: So you think everything in the West is bad?

ME: I never said any such thing. In fact, when it comes to epistemology I am a Neo-Kantian.

COLLEAGUE: But you think Chinese philosophy is better than Western philosophy?

ME: I didn’t say that either. I value them both.

COLLEAGUE: Western science and technology shows the superiority of the West.

ME: China was considerably in advance of the West technologically until the start of the scientific revolution. The compass, gunpowder, and printing with moveable type were all invented in China. And any competent historian will tell you that the scientific revolution was the result of a series of historical accidents and coincidences that fortuitously worked out well for the West. For example, Kepler was led to his laws of planetary motion because he was looking for a mystical correspondence between the five Platonic Solids and the orbits of Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn.

COLLEAGUE: Look this is the tradition we work in. Take it or leave it. [Note: Yes, someone I know was told this in response to the suggestion that they add non-Western philosophy to the curriculum.]

ME: Have you ever heard the expression, “the unexamined life is not worth living for a human”?

Where was your first academic job?

I ended up getting a Visiting Assistant Professor position at the University of Vermont, where I was replacing a senior scholar in Chinese philosophy who was visiting for two years at the University of Hong Kong.

This particular scholar had learned in graduate school that the only sensible position in normative ethics is utilitarianism, and the only plausible position in meta-ethics is anti-realism. (He also thought he was a relativist and/or a skeptic, even though it was never clear how all these views fit together.) Consequently, in his worldview, everything in Chinese philosophy could be subdivided into (1) views that are self-evidently true because they are utilitarianism or moral anti-realism and (2) all other views, which are self-evidently false (and are views that only someone guilty of the greatest stupidity and moral turpitude could hold). Mozi and Zhuangzi were the round pegs forced into the former square holes, while everything else in Chinese philosophy (and everyone who didn’t agree with him) were worthy of nothing but sarcastic dismissal. This scholar also bragged (literally bragged) about how his teachers in graduate school said his command of Classical Chinese was very poor. Obviously, those of us with solid training in philosophy and Sinology saw through him pretty quickly. However, he followed Benjamin Disraeli’s advice that “Everyone likes flattery and…you should lay it on with a trowel.” I was disappointed to discover how often this method worked to earn him fawning admirers. He supported the decision of the University of Vermont to hire me as his temporary replacement, presumably because he thought the trowel approach would work with me too. However, when I kept asking him over email to explain or provide textual evidence for his views, he became increasingly hostile, eventually dismissing my work as “high-camp garbage.”

What did you do when the University of Vermont position expired?

I followed my first wife to the University of Northern Iowa, where she got a position in the computer science department. The first year there I was unemployed, and spent a lot of time in the farmhouse we rented, feeling worthless and depressed. The second year, they made me a part-time Visiting Assistant Professor, which at least gave me a reason to get out of bed in the morning. By the end of that year, I had been on the job market for four years, had applied for over 1,000 jobs (I kept track), had published a book, four refereed articles (with several more “in the pipeline”), multiple entries in a major reference work, a number of brief reviews—and had only two visiting positions to show for it. I told my wife that I would go on the philosophy job market one more time, but would also apply to law school at the University of Iowa. If I didn’t get a philosophy job, I would go to law school (which was within commuting distance of the University of Northern Iowa), but if I did get a philosophy job my wife would move with me (because computer scientists have much better job opportunities). As it turned out, I was admitted to law school, but also was offered a tenure-track job by Vassar College.

Nice! Challenges?

By the time I arrived at Vassar, I had been teaching since I was in graduate school. However, this was my first experience teaching at a liberal arts college, which is very different from teaching at a university, particularly at a top-tier research university (an “R1” in the lingo of the field) like Stanford. I’m going to say something controversial here, but I believe it to be very clearly true. On average, professors at R1s care much less about teaching undergraduates, they know much less about teaching undergraduates, and they do a poorer job of teaching undergraduates than professors at liberal arts colleges. There are counterexamples in both directions, but to cite the professors at R1s who are great and dedicated teachers and the professors at liberal arts colleges who are just “phoning it in” is to commit the fallacy of anecdotal evidence.

While faculty at liberal arts colleges are, on average, more concerned about providing high quality undergraduate education to their students, this doesn’t mean that they always know the best way to measure that quality. After my first semester, I read my numerical teaching evaluations and, based on my experience teaching at Stanford, the University of Vermont, and the University of Northern Iowa, I thought they were pretty good. However, I looked more carefully at the form and noticed that there was a post-it note from the chair of my department: “These scores must be very disappointing for you, but don’t worry. Many people who start out with bad scores later learn to teach very well.”

Student teaching evaluations are a fraught issue. When I started my career, everyone seemed to have absolute and dogmatic faith that they correlated with good teaching. We have since learned that student teaching evaluations unfairly discriminate against women and people of color. (For example, in online courses, if you change the given name of the same instructor from a female name to a male name, student evaluations will go up.) I am one of the undeserved beneficiaries of this kind of bias, but there is no evidence that positive evaluations are correlated with student learning for anyone. In fact, one of the best teachers I ever worked with, Lee Yearley at Stanford, argued that it is actually a bad sign if all the students in a class are uniformly positive. Part of being a good teacher in the humanities is challenging one’s students’ assumptions. If no students are ever outraged by what you taught them, are you pushing them enough? In general, if we knew how to evaluate good teaching in a quantitative or other clearly objective manner, we’d all be doing it and we’d all be doing it the same way, but we don’t know how to evaluate it, so we use all kinds of inconsistent and equally meaningless survey instruments.

Teaching advice?

I have three pieces of advice for improving your teaching evaluations (and possibly, in some cases, actually improving your teaching). (1) Be enthusiastic! Excitement is charming and infectious. Convey to your students your love of philosophy. Move around the room, make big gestures, climb on the table. One of my favorite moments during the semester is when I teach about Zen kōans. I tell a student, “Ask me: ‘What is the Buddha nature?’” The student dutifully asks the question—and I scream at them at the top of my lungs. This really is a classic kōan, and it sure wakes students up. (Note: It’s prudent to pick a student who is in love with your class, and let them in on the gag prior to doing it.) (2) Have a lesson plan for each class. You don’t need to have every minute of the class accounted for (in fact, that would probably make the class feel dead), but walk in with an idea about what you want your students to learn. This leads to point (3): do not be overly optimistic about how much students can absorb, either in one class meeting or over the course of the semester. For example, in a single one-hour class meeting you might explain to students what relativism is: cognitive vs. ethical, and individual vs. cultural. That is a lot! Do not expect them to learn and remember anything else from that class. In fact, make sure to review these concepts later in the semester. I also tell a lot of anecdotes in my class to illustrate various points. For instance, I have a ten-minute story about the mystery of what happened after astronaut Gus Grissom’s capsule safely splashed down in the Pacific. (Look it up.) Why do I take up so much class time with this story? It is a memorable way of illustrating a case of motivated doubt so that students can contrast it with a case of unmotivated doubt. In addition, it helps break up the rhythm of the class. (4) Do not forget that things that seem intuitively obvious to you (and even things that seemed intuitively obvious to you as a first-year student) are far from obvious to your students. For example, many of your students find modus tollens wildly unintuitive. Don’t believe me? Try giving your students a brief introduction to deductive reasoning, and then ask them to discuss whether modus tollens is or is not valid. Here’s another one: ask your students whether you can know something that is not true. Many students do not share the linguistic intuition that you can only know something that is true. (5) If you really care about your students learning, you have to incentivize them to make the best use of their time. Many students will skip lots of classes and blow off the readings. Consequently, I recommend that you do things like making attendance part of the course grade, and giving brief weekly assignments that require completing the assigned readings. I also strongly suggest that you ban the use of laptops and cell phones in class. There are mountains of empirical evidence that students learn better without the distractions of electronic devices. Finally, (6) when commenting on student essays, don’t overwhelm them with feedback. I used to basically re-write students’ essays for them. But I eventually realized that most students cannot process that many corrections. Figure out what two or three things would most help this particular student to write better, and focus on those.

Do you consider yourself a good teacher?

I consistently get student evaluations above the mean at Vassar, and the Princeton Review even identified me as one of the best 300 professors in the US. However, I just told you that we have no reason to trust student evaluations as evidence of good teaching, and an award that was based on the self-selected group of students who rated me on an online website is hardly a model of good data mining. Here is what I think it comes down to. Make it easy for students to stay awake and be attentive in class; have a clear idea about what you want your students to know or be able to do after they have finished your class; explain things in clear, simple language; do something to make sure students are actually attending class and completing the readings; provide a tractable amount of constructive feedback on student essays. Any student should be able to learn in an environment like this.

What do you do in your spare time nowadays?

When I have time for it, my favorite hobby is poker. Many people are stunned to learn that I have played in the World Series of Poker (WSOP) in Las Vegas. I admit that this is an unusual achievement for a professional philosopher, but playing (as opposed to winning) is not as difficult as some people think. All you need to do is to show up in Las Vegas when the WSOP is running and buy your way into a tournament. The cheapest are only $1,000 to enter, and those are the ones I have been in. The Main Event is the tournament they televise on ESPN, but it’s $10,000 to enter. Someday I hope to cash in a smaller tournament and use the winnings to enter the Main Event.

Why poker?

I got an eye roll from a colleague once when I compared playing poker to investing in stocks. His response reflects widespread ignorance about how poker differs from pure gambling. An anecdotal illustration of the difference is the cautionary tale of Las Vegas legend Archie Karas. In the early 1990s, Karas won $40 million beating people at poker and pool, games of skill, and then lost it all over a period of three weeks playing high stakes craps and baccarat, games of chance. But let’s look more precisely at the difference.

Suppose you play roulette, a game of pure chance, and wager $1 on number 13. The numbers on an American roulette wheel are 1 to 36, along with both a 0 and a 00. So the odds against you winning are 37:1. If you do win, you will be paid $35 for every $1 you wagered. So, on average, for every thirty-eight $1 wagers you make, you will lose $37 and win $35 for a net of -$2 over 38 tries. (Alternatively, your expected value for any one bet is 1/38*$35-37/38*$1=-$1/19.) All house games are like this, which is why they cannot be beaten. You will always lose in the long run.

In poker, though, you win or lose almost all your money from other players, not the casino. The casino makes a profit by taking a “rake” from every pot, usually 10% and capped at a certain amount (e.g., never more than $4 per pot for low stakes). This makes it sound like the casino doesn’t make very much from poker. It doesn’t. Most casinos would rather have slot machines in what are now their poker rooms. However, customers who play poker are a cranky and insistent bunch, and believe it or not that can make a difference. In addition, casinos count on the poker players (or their spouses) also stopping by the pit to lose money at games like craps and roulette. In other words, poker is often what salesmen call a loss leader.

Of course, even if the house is taking very little out of the pot, that doesn’t prove by itself that any one player can win. But there are two reasons why one can win money. First, most players make mathematical errors in their betting. Second, most players are very predictable.

Explain!

Let’s start with mathematical errors. Suppose it is the middle of a poker hand, with $2000 already in the pot. (If you are completely ignorant of poker, the “pot” is the money that has already been wagered and will be taken by whoever wins the hand.) Arnie and Brenda each have $1000 in their “stacks” (the money that each has not yet wagered). Arnie has a pair of aces, while Brenda only has an inside straight draw. Brenda will win if she successfully completes her straight, but will lose otherwise. It is Arnie’s turn to act, and he wagers all of his remaining $1000, so the pot is now $3000. Brenda has two choices: she can fold, which means that she gives up any chance of winning the pot, but also risks no more money, or she can call by adding $1000 to the pot, which means that she still has a chance to win the pot, but can also lose the additional $1000. So if Brenda calls she is risking $1000 to win $3000, giving her odds of 3:1. Assuming that Brenda will get one more card, the odds are approximately 11:1 against her completing her straight. So for every 12 times Brenda calls in a situation like this, she will win $3000 one time, and lose a total of -$11,000 for the other times, for an average net of -$8000 over every 12 hands. (If you prefer, the expected value of her call is 1/12*$3000-11/12*$1000=-$667.) Although Brenda should definitely fold, it is amazing how often players in similar situations call.

What about Arnie? If he does not bet, he is giving Brenda a chance to beat him at no cost to her, so he should bet. If he bets and Brenda folds, he wins $2000 at no cost to himself. If he bets and Brenda calls, he will lose -$1000 one time out of 12 and win $22,000 the other 11 times, so the situation is immensely profitable for him on average. However, many players in Archie’s situation either check (do not bet) or bet an amount small enough that Brenda actually does have the right odds to call.

Because their cards are hidden, Brenda doesn’t know that Arnie has a pair of aces and Arnie doesn’t know that Brenda has an inside straight draw, but they can have a justified, true belief about the range of hands the other player has. This brings us to the second reason that you make money at poker: Most players are very predictable. I’ll illustrate this with the Baluga Whale Theorem (BWT), a generalization well known among savvy poker players. I should explain that BWT is not a “theorem” in the sense we talk about mathematical theorems. Rather, it is a generalization about how people tend to play at low stakes. BWT is also not a recommendation about how people should play. However, it has implications for what the correct play is. I’m going to give a very oversimplified version of it here simply to make a point.

In order to understand the BWT, you need to know something about how to play hold'em poker. In hold’em, each player is dealt two “hole cards” that only she sees. There is then a round of betting. Next three “community cards” (called the “flop”) are dealt face up in the middle of the table. Each player can use any or all of these cards to make the best poker hand in combination with their two hole cards. There is another round of betting after the flop. Then a fourth card is dealt face up (called the “turn”) and there is another round of betting. Finally, a fifth card is dealt face up (called the “river”) and there is the last round of betting.

Suppose you raise on the first round of betting and are called by one player. The flop comes, you bet and are called by the same player. The turn comes, and it is a card that would appear to most players to be a “blank” (a card that is unlikely to connect with anyone’s hole cards). You bet, and the other player now raises you. The Baluga Whale Theorem says that the opponent who raises you here, after calling pre-flop and on the flop, probably has a very strong hand. Why? Because that is the way that most small stakes players play when they make a big hand on the flop in this situation. The reason this is so important is that, if you know BWT, you can figure out what kind of hole cards your opponent has, even though you can’t see them directly. You can save money by folding what would normally be a strong hand in the face of a BWT-type raise on the turn, or if you have an exceptionally strong hand, you know that you can put in a big re-raise and get called. This is just one example of a common pattern of play.

The strategy isn’t to just behave unpredictably, right?

Better players do play unpredictably to a certain extent. Good players will sometimes check with a hand you would expect them to bet, or raise a hand you would expect them to fold. However, the only way to be absolutely unpredictable is to completely randomize one’s play: check, bet, fold and raise without regard to the value of your hands. But there is a high cost of complete randomization. You will frequently wager a lot with weak hands, and wager little with strong hands. This will be a mathematical error, and against even a moderately skilled player you will lose in the long run. Consequently, against a good player you have to partially randomize your play, and do so at points that are likely to be misleading to the particular player you are up against.

And when is that?

There is no fixed rule about this. Indeed, there cannot be a fixed rule about deceptive play, because there is a counter strategy for every deception. For example, perhaps the most basic strategy in hold’em poker is to make a “continuation bet” on the flop, after raising pre-flop, regardless of whether the flop helped your hand. The continuation bet is a sort of bluff, in which you pretend that either the flop made your hand stronger, or you already had such a strong hand that you didn’t need the flop to help you. A continuation bet will often allow a player to win the pot with a weak hand.

However, since continuation betting is a basic strategy, almost everyone knows it, and many players will respond by calling your flop raise. If you check on the turn, your opponent will guess that you were simply continuation betting the flop, and will bet the turn himself, winning the pot. (This technique is called “floating.”) Of course, many players know about floating, so they will continuation bet on the flop and then bet again on the turn, even if the turn did not help their hand either. (This is called “double-barreling.”) Of course, many players know about double-barreling, so…and the process goes on forever. Truly great players have a skill that goes beyond any rules that allows them to win consistently in the long run.

In your mind, does any of this have anything to do with philosophy?

Long ago, Aristotle recognized that there are skills like this. One of his favorite examples was sailing a boat. A boat captain knows many rules of thumb (“red sky at night, sailor’s delight; red sky in the morning, sailor take warning”). He also knows some mathematical facts (“if the ship’s center of gravity is above the water line, it will begin to capsize”). However, the complete set of rules underdetermines the correct action in any situation. This is why sea captains are given both immense discretionary authority but also held very accountable for anything that goes wrong. Aristotle thought that ethical wisdom, phronesis, is a similar kind of skill that is underdetermined by precise rules. I think so too, and I think my knowledge of poker has helped me philosophically by giving me another example of a knowledge that is like Aristotelian practical wisdom. In both poker and in ethics, there are right choices and wrong choices, despite the fact that there is no algorithm for the decision procedure. And, in both, some people are demonstrably better at making the right choices. I could go on: a player who is frustrated after a long string of losing hands may “know” that they do not have the right odds to call a bet, but they will often give into temptation and do so anyway. This is a poker manifestation of Aristotelian akrasia, “weakness of will,” in which one knows, in some sense, the right choice but makes the wrong choice.

Does Chinese philosophy speak to cutting edge philosophical debates in the West?

There are too many to list them all, but here are two topics on which I think Chinese philosophy has a lot to contribute. First, Confucians and Daoists can teach Western virtue ethics about new, plausible candidates for human flourishing or “living well.” We all understand the general concept of what it is to “live well” or to “live your best life” (to use a contemporary expression). And we all want to live well. We simply disagree about what living well is. People who deny that they want to “live well” are rejecting some particular candidate for what it is to live well, not the concept of living well in general. For example, some people might say they don’t want to “live well” because they think that altruism and integrity are crap. But if you ask that person how they want their own life to go, they will say something like, “I want to be rich and famous.” So, for that person, being rich and famous is their concept of “living well.” Aristotle and the Confucians considered the possibility that having wealth and social prestige are what living well is, and they offered what I think are definitive arguments that these things cannot possibly be living well. But the narrow point is that, even if you reject the Aristotelian and Confucians answers to the question, “What is it to live well?” that is just because you have your own conception of what it is to live well, and you want to succeed in living well as you understand it.

What can Confucians teach us about well-being?

In the Anglo-European tradition of virtue ethics, four candidates for living well have been taken the most seriously: the life of theoretical inquiry (like being a physicist, mathematician, or philosopher), the life of social activity aimed at the good of the community (like working for the government or an NGO dedicated to public service), the life of contemplation of God (like being a monk or nun, or the “beatific vision of God” that some people think we experience after death), and the life of artistic creation or appreciation (like being a painter, sculptor, or art connoisseur). I think a life organized around any of these is a very plausible candidate for living well. Now, Confucians recognize the value of a life of public service. Historically speaking, Confucians have generally sought government office, or if they have avoided it they have done so on principled grounds, like refusal to serve a corrupt or illegitimate ruler. But Confucians also recognize a fifth candidate for living well: the life of a family member (simply being a good mother, father, son, daughter, or sibling).

I think it is a significant blind spot in Western virtue ethics that the life of participation in a family is not recognized as a form or flourishing or living well. In the Republic, Plato says that the highest and most ethically cultivated class, the philosopher-kings and -queens, would have their spouses and children in common, because Plato thought that familial attachments were inconsistent with the level of objectivity that should characterize the highest manifestation of virtue. (Incidentally, there was a swinger’s club in Manhattan in the late 70s and early 80s that was called “Plato’s Retreat,” as an homage to Plato’s proposal—a fun bit of trivia that I enjoy bringing up in lecture to keep students awake.)

Now, St. Augustine made celibacy part of the Roman Catholic tradition. Members of the clergy were not uniformly celibate in Augustine’s era. It was partly the influence of Platonic ideas that led Augustine to argue for, and convince others, that celibacy should be a requirement for leaders of the Church. Plato’s student, Aristotle, had a slightly more positive view of the family. Aristotle says we need families; however, he thought families were merely necessary in order to produce and maintain the households of men who are then free to practice the activities that constitute genuine flourishing: political activity aimed at the good of the community and theoretical inquiry. For Aristotelians, being a family member is a purely instrumental good, not a good in itself.

Does this influence how we think about the family today?

Absolutely! Try the following experiment (which I have done many times myself). Ask a philosopher what he or she thinks makes their own life worth living. I find that almost always people mention the joy of theoretical understanding. Some people also talk about administrative work as a chair or dean as part of service to the community. Then I ask them about how their own family fits into their conception of living well. These are typically people with spouses and children, but they are usually taken aback by the question. It has usually never occurred to them how their own family fits into a life well lived. This stunning failure to be reflective about a major aspect of their own lives is due to the fact that they have never encountered a philosophy that takes the family seriously.

I mean western feminist philosophers have talked about the importance of the family, right?

Yes, in fact, Nel Noddings was on the committee for the oral exam for my dissertation. The work that Noddings and others have done to point out the moral significance of the family is very valuable. However, Confucian philosophers have much else to offer in terms of their detailed conceptions of ethical cultivation, the nature of the virtues, and other topics.

Speaking of which, are there many feminist thinkers in East Asian philosophical traditions?

Unfortunately, the East Asian traditions are just as sexist and patriarchal as the Anglo-European traditions. There are a handful of works written by women philosophers, but they are typically defenses of the status quo, rather than calls for women’s liberation. Ann Pang-White’s translation, The Confucian Four Books for Women is a great resource on this genre. For writings about women and gender in general, Robin Wang’s Images of Women in Chinese Thought and Culture is very useful. Li Zhi (1527-1602) is one of the few men who argued specifically for the equality of women. A Book to Burn and a Book to Keep Hidden, translated by Rivi Handler-Spitz, Pauline Lee, and Haun Saussy is the work to read by him. In the 20th century we get more women defending their equality in their own voices. The Birth of Chinese Feminism, by Lydia Liu, Rebecca Karl, and Dorothy Ko is an excellent resource. One of the authors in this anthology, He-Yin Zhen (1884?-1920?) is particularly interesting. She anticipates by decades later discussions of the “intersectionality” of gender and class.

For Confucians, what does it mean to be a member of a family?

Being a member of a family is not, by itself, flourishing. It’s parallel to the fact that earning a degree in physics does not by itself prove that you have successfully lived the life of theoretical contemplation. You have to perform the role well. Anyone who has been a father or mother knows that these are very challenging tasks, and being a good sibling or child can also be difficult. It seems to me quite plausible that being good at raising children or doing the difficult work of maintaining loving family relationships in the contemporary world can be a form of human flourishing in itself. Confucians draw our attention to this.

You mentioned that Daoists have valuable insights into virtue ethics…

Yes, the great Daoist philosopher Zhuangzi argues that learned, skillful activities (even one as mundane and sanguineous as being a butcher) can express attunement to the “natural pattern” of the universe. We “lose ourselves” (his phrase) in such activities, thereby becoming part of something greater than ourselves. Zhuangzi’s thought influenced the Chinese reception of Buddhism, which led to the Zen Buddhist view that practical activities (from calligraphy to swordsmanship) can both cultivate and express the transcendence of the narrow confines of the individual self. As the great Japanese swordsman, Miyamoto Musashi, said: the way of the sword and the way of the writing brush are one.

Aristotelians have a standard objection to identifying the exercise of a skill with virtue. The skilled doctor knows how to heal but also knows how to poison her enemies and make it look like a natural death. The skilled building contractor knows how to make a house well but also knows how to skimp on materials and labor in a way that will not be evident until the check clears. The Zhuangzian or Buddhist answer to Aristotle is that, if you truly lose yourself in the craft, you will also lose the selfish motivations that would make you want to murder someone or cheat someone for your own personal benefit. I’m not sure I am personally convinced by this response (which is one reason I am a Confucian rather than a Daoist). However, it is undeniable that Western philosophy has stressed “knowing that” over “knowing how” (to use Ryle’s distinction). But the singular emphasis on the value of “knowing that” does not do justice to our intuition that there is something uniquely admirable about the basketball player who is “in the zone” or the grandmaster playing chess. It is at least worth taking more seriously the intuition that skillful activity might be a form of human flourishing.

This example is also related to virtue ethics. Confucians have a long and sophisticated tradition of discussing forms of ethical cultivation, and I think Western philosophers could learn a lot from it. Western philosophers have also discussed ethical cultivation. As Pierre Hadot points out, there is an ancient tradition in the West of treating Philosophy as a Way of Life, and not as a purely theoretical exercise. This includes studying methods of ethical cultivation. I think it is important to remember that this is a part of Western philosophy, because some people try to simplistically distinguish East Asian philosophy from Anglo-European philosophy by saying that the former is practical in its orientation while the latter is purely theoretical in its orientation. In fact, every philosophical tradition has both theoretical and practical interests. Although Western philosophers have historically been interested in ethical cultivation, this is a topic that is neglected in much of contemporary Anglo-European philosophy. So, for starters, Confucians are useful for reminding us of the value and seriousness of the topic of ethical cultivation. In addition, Confucians offer a voluminous and profound literature on this topic, one that I personally find more impressive than comparable accounts in Western philosophy.

Example?

My colleague P. J. Ivanhoe wrote a book, Confucian Moral Self Cultivation, in which he summarizes some of the major positions on this topic over two and a half millennia. He argues that the debate on this topic is framed by a saying of Confucius: “If you learn but do not think, you will be confused; if you think, but do not learn, you will be in danger.” I think Confucius’s point is that if you read books and attend lectures but do not think about what you are learning means, you will simply have memorized an indigested mass of facts that will mean nothing to you. On the other hand, if you think without learning you will mistake your own shallow thoughts for profundities and shallow platitudes for revolutionary insights.

Later Confucians agreed that learning and thinking were important, but they argued about the comparative weight to assign to each. To what extent are we transformed by learning from others (including both book learning and socialization), and to what extent is the key to ethical improvement using one’s innate insight and trusting one’s own emotions? The Confucian philosophers Mengzi and Xunzi started the dialectic. Mengzi argued that human nature is good, in the sense of possessing innate but incipient tendencies toward virtue, so the key to ethical cultivation is self-consciously exercising and thereby strengthening our innate dispositions toward benevolence and integrity. Xunzi explicitly rejected Mengzi’s position, arguing that human nature is bad, in the sense that following our innate dispositions inevitably leads to conflict. Xunzi claimed that virtues are completely acquired through habituation, rather than innate.

I mean, isn’t that—how to accomplish x—an empirical, rather than philosophical, question?

There is certainly an empirical element to the question of what practices in fact make people more virtuous. But it’s also important to recognize the limitations of empirical method. The end-state that we are trying to produce, virtue, is not something that we can observe merely by using our senses, so we cannot determine whether it has been achieved in a purely empirical way.

Other Chinese or Indian philosophical views that Western philosophers are missing out on?

Again, there are too many to list them all, but here is one I find especially interesting. Most of my philosophical career, my metaphysical intuitions have been broadly Aristotelian. That is to say, I have thought that the universe consists of a plurality of independently existing things (“substances,” in the technical language of Aristotle), and that other categories of entities (like qualities or properties) must be metaphysically grounded in these ultimate things. It’s an intuitively attractive view—at least at first glance. In the last few years, though, I have become increasingly convinced by the anti-substantialist views of Madhyamaka Buddhist philosophers like Nāgārjuna, Śāntideva, and Fazang. Each of them argues that there are no independent things or selves.

Buddhist philosophers describe their view as being the “middle way” in several senses. Metaphysically, Madhyamaka Buddhism describes itself as the middle way between Eternalism, the view that something exists completely independently of anything else, and Nihilism, the view that nothing exists in any sense. So they do not deny that, for example, sandwiches exist in some sense. It’s true that I had a sandwich for lunch, so obviously sandwiches exist in some manner. However, a sandwich does not exist independently of everything else. The sandwich I ate is a combination of ham, cheese and mayo in between two slices of bread. Using the technical language of Buddhist metaphysics, the sandwich is dependent upon the ham, cheese, mayo, and bread. But each of these components is itself dependent upon something else. Mayonnaise, for example, does not exist by itself, but is dependent upon oil, egg yolk, and vinegar. Now, an Aristotelian can admit all of this, but will say that there must be some ultimate substance that grounds all the other higher level properties and identities. The Madhyamaka Buddhist suggestion is that everything is dependent on other things. It is, to use a line from the classic philosophical joke, “turtles all the way down.”

I used to have the intuition that there simply has to be some ultimate reality that grounds everything else. But the notion of an ultimate reality that is not dependent for its existence or identity on anything else is actually very puzzling. Aristotle wrestled with it inconclusively in Books Z and H of his Metaphysics. Descartes basically admitted that we cannot visualize what an ultimate substance would be like, because anything specific we imagine will not be the ultimate substance in itself, but will be the qualities of the substance. So, for example, if you think sub-atomic particles are the ultimate things in the universe that ground everything else, you are forgetting that they are themselves dependent on mass-energy. But mass-energy does not, in itself, have any specific qualities until it manifests itself in some specific form. And the qualities of any sub atomic particles are dependent on the other particles they interact with, and are ultimately dependent on the Big Bang.

Would you say your personal life influences the way you do philosophy? Does philosophy influence the way you live your life?

Philosophy certainly influences my personal life. On the one hand, I recognize that I am a person who has a huge number of vices and weaknesses. However, I think I am a slightly better person than I would be otherwise because of the philosophy that I have studied.

Does philosophy make you a better person?

We talked earlier about how Confucians defend the ethical value of familial life, of being a good father, mother, child, or sibling, for example. I have two children who have become wonderful adults, and I am proud to say that I took an active role in raising them, from changing diapers and staying up with colicky infants to making time to help them with their homework and just share their interests when they were teenagers. Now, Aristotle would say that I was wasting my time raising children, because a “great-souled” man should be spending his time on theoretical research or matters of state. However, as a Confucian I believe that an important and intrinsically valuable part of my identity is being a father.

You wouldn’t have been an active parent if you had not studied Confucianism?

I wouldn’t say anything that extreme. But our values influence what we do, how we do it, and how we feel about what we do. I was able to “parent” enthusiastically, not begrudgingly, because of the values I had learned from Confucianism.

Can you tell us a bit about your family?

Unfortunately, I cannot tell you too much.

Why not?

Because of my political writings as a public intellectual, I have been called out by far-right groups and even received a couple of threatening messages. Consequently, I try not to make any identifying public references to my spouse, children, other relatives, or even my pets, so that they do not become potential targets. Other people have it much worse, particularly academics who are female, people of color, LGBTQ, or ones who simply don’t have tenure like I do.

What were the political writings in question?

In “Trump’s Confederate Fallacies” I argued that we can make a principled distinction between monuments that honor people who did bad things and monuments that honor people for the bad things that they did. For example, we should never forget that Thomas Jefferson owned and sexually exploited slaves, but the Jefferson Memorial is to honor him for other things, like the Declaration of Independence. Monuments to people like Robert E. Lee, in contrast, are there to honor him precisely for his treason and his defense of slavery. One commentator on this essay helpfully noted that if I crossed his property line he would shoot me.

In “The Ignorant Do Not Have a Right to an Audience” I make a distinction between freedom of expression and “just access.” Individual freedom of expression should be almost absolute, as it is now. However, access to large audiences via the media (particularly television and newspapers) is a finite resource that editors and TV executives apportion according to their own agendas. As Herbert Marcuse pointed out years ago, what we often find in popular media are manifestly false and moronic views being given platforms. In my article, I point out that you cannot, for example, defend the choice to provide an audience to a D-list celebrity who wants to share their uninformed views on the safety and efficacy of vaccinations on the basis of only freedom of expression, because there are many informed doctors and scientists whom you could have given an audience to instead. This essay won the 2019 American Philosophical Association Public Philosophy Op-ed Prize, but it was not well received by everyone. For instance, someone in the American Midwest went to the trouble of finding my surface mail address in Singapore (where I was teaching) and sending me a physical letter with a large swastika.

So…let’s see…can you tell me how you met your wife?

I can tell you a fun, non-identifying anecdote. My wife had never met a white guy who spoke Chinese before, so after we started dating seriously she earnestly asked me whether I was a spy. I replied, “No—but of course that is exactly the answer I would give if I were a spy.” Then I winked.

Is your wife interested in philosophy?

No, but she’ll humor me if I want to talk about it, kind of like the way I humor her Guy Fieri fixation.

Common interests?

She’s really into poker too. In fact, I’m probably the only husband who’s ever gotten in trouble with his wife for spending his poker bankroll on bills—instead of the other way around.

Explain!

We went to a casino once and she asked why my poker bankroll seemed a little small. I explained that the property taxes on our house came due, and we were a little short on cash that month, so I used the money I had won playing poker that year to pay off our taxes. She complained, “That money was for you to play poker with, not pay bills!” I laughed and said, “I think this is the first time in history anyone has had THIS conversation.”

How would you describe your wife?

She’s a very caring person. Her career has always been about protecting people who cannot fully care for themselves. I also really admire her determination. She put herself through college while working full time and got through law school while caring for a mother who had been disabled by a stroke. We also have very similar senses of humor. She can really crack me up like no one else.

Take this question in the spirit that it is intended: what drew her to you?

I guess in the short run, I seem more charming than I really am, so I had that going for me.

The kids interested in philosophy?

Not especially, although they picked up a fair amount from me along the way. My daughter took a college philosophy course and ended up explaining Zeno’s Paradox to her Teaching Assistant. I have both a son and a daughter, and they’ve both always been very smart and compassionate people. They’re both witty as well. When they were in grade school, I read them a simplified version of the Odyssey. When I explained that both Penelope and Circe were in love with Odysseus, my son quipped, “His cologne must really be working for him.”

So, you’re currently associated with several different departments. How would you describe the departments you are associated with, to an outsider?

Yes, I’ve been at Vassar College for more than twenty years, and I recently became the James Monroe Taylor Chair in Philosophy there. But I am also Chair Professor in the School of Philosophy at Wuhan University in China, and from 2017-2020 I was Kwan Im Thong Hood Cho Temple Professor in the Humanities at Yale-NUS College.

Vassar has a wonderfully pluralistic philosophy department. Of course, it’s one of the few colleges or universities in the US where you can study Chinese philosophy, and it also offers a variety of approaches to ] philosophy, including Latin American philosophy, metaphysics, feminist theory, epistemology, applied ethics, political philosophy, Continental and analytic philosophy, among others. I also know that, going forward, there is interest in hiring someone in Indian philosophy if we get authorization from the administration.

What is it like teaching at Wuhan University in China?

I’ve taught a variety of things there, but recently I’ve settled into teaching a course on comparative Anglo-Confucian Political Philosophy. We read selections from pre-modern Confucian thinkers like Mengzi and Huang Zongxi, recent advocates of Confucian political revivalism like Jiang Qing, and defenders of Western liberalism like John Rawls.

And what about Yale-NUS College in Singapore?

I really admire the Common Curriculum at Yale-NUS. I think 18-year-olds don’t know yet what they need to study. At Yale-NUS, all first-year students are required to take a two-semester multicultural Literature & Humanities course in which they read Homer’s Odyssey, Valmiki’s Ramayana, and Journey to the West among other classics; they also take a two-semester multicultural course on Philosophy and Political Thought in which they read Mengzi, Zhuangzi, Plato, Aristotle, the Bhagavad Gita, the Nyāya Sutras, The Questions of King Milinda, among others. They also have required courses in statistics, natural science, and social sciences. It is demanding but students get a great background before they go on to their majors. And it shows that it possible to teach philosophy and literature from a multicultural perspective without sacrificing rigor. I think Yale-NUS has a lot of potential to become a model for other institutions.

If things had gone differently, do you think you could have been happy doing law?

I think so. Lots of philosophy majors go on to law school, and many philosophers go back to law school if they cannot find a job in academia. The reading, writing, and reasoning skills required in law and in philosophy are very similar. It would have been interesting to see what kind of law I ended up doing. Because of my interest in China, it would have been natural to do international law, but the law school I was admitted to did not have much depth in that area. I’m also interested in public affairs, so maybe I would have gravitated toward Constitutional law. Of course, jurisprudence is also a natural area of specialization for a philosopher who becomes an attorney, so maybe I would have ended up in academia after all.

In philosophy, are there views that are considered controversial that shouldn't be, in your estimation?

I am still amazed that there are educated and seemingly sane adults who believe in physicalism. I think if we have learned anything in the last hundred years or so it is that physicalism is simple-minded reductionism that has never been more than a rubber check that bounces whenever you try to cash it out. Don’t get me wrong. I believe in natural science, but there is clearly more to the world than mass-energy distributed across space-time.

Can you give examples of what you have in mind?

I have never seen even vaguely plausible naturalistic accounts of mathematics, mental states, or normativity.

But are there plausible non-naturalistic accounts of this stuff?

We don’t have an uncontroversial solution to any problem in philosophy. As Russell pointed out in The Problems of Philosophy, once a problem gets solved, it’s no longer a philosophical problem. But I can’t even imagine how, for example, contemporary physics, which is supposed to be purely descriptive, is supposed to explain normativity, which by its nature is not purely descriptive. As Nagel pointed out in The View from Nowhere, we cannot and should not try to escape the fact that we have to see the world from multiple perspectives. Contemporary physics is one of our paradigms of a successful third-person perspective on the world. But our admiration for physics should not allow us to forget that we also have an ineliminable first-person perspective. Part of our first-person perspective is the recognition that certain courses of action open to us are “better” than others. From the third-person perspective of physics, it makes no difference whether we choose what is better for us. But we cannot even imagine acting as agents in the world while remaining indifferent to which of our choices are “better” for us.

Of what you've written so far, what stuff would you say is the most important? Why?

I’ve consciously written work that appeals to different audiences with different needs, so I’d say that my work, especially my books, have been “important” (if I have to use that term) in different ways. For example, I take teaching very seriously, so I have written an inter-related series of books on Chinese philosophy for classroom use, including Readings in Classical Chinese Philosophy (which I co-edited with Philip J. Ivanhoe), Introduction to Classical Chinese Philosophy (a secondary work keyed to the readings in the former anthology), Classical Chinese for Everyone: A Guide for Absolute Beginners (which teaches the language, using examples mostly drawn from the anthology), and Readings in Later Chinese Philosophy (which I co-edited with Justin Tiwald).

The books I wrote primarily for my fellow scholars are Virtue Ethics and Consequentialism in Early Chinese Philosophy and my translation of the Mengzi: With Selections from Traditional Commentators. However, I have been pleasantly surprised by how many undergraduate courses use the latter book, and I recently recorded an audiobook version of my Mengzi translation that seems to be doing quite well.

In the last few years, I have been doing more work as a public intellectual, writing more for a general audience about the relevance of philosophy for public affairs. My book Taking Back Philosophy: A Multicultural Manifesto is my most significant and popular work in that regard. In addition to discussing the value and historical reception of Chinese philosophy in the West, this book talks about the culture wars and anti-intellectualism that have infected political discourse in the US.

Is there any book or article that you are especially proud of?

Actually, there are three things I figured out that I think were particularly novel and perhaps a little clever. First, in "Unweaving the 'One Thread' of Analects 4:15” (which I published in Confucius and the “Analects”: New Essays) I showed that the great Neo-Confucian commentator Zhu Xi interprets a particularly important exchange between Confucius and his disciple Zengzi as structurally identical to a kōan exchange. Confucius tosses a patently cryptic comment at his disciple, who is then shocked into enlightenment by it. I’m not sure that is what is actually going on in the passage, but I am sure that is how Zhu Xi interprets it, and I don’t think anyone saw this before, at least not that I have seen in English-language scholarship. I published this article years ago, but I recently explained my interpretation at a public talk that one of my former teachers, Victor Mair, attended, and he literally got out of his seat and bowed to me as an expression of how impressed he was with my interpretation.

The second thing I’m particularly proud of came out of an online debate I participated in many years ago about the meaning of the Chinese term “dao,” usually translated as “Way.” You see, in its earliest use “dao” refers to a path or road, and then by an obvious metaphorical extension it comes to mean a “way” of doing something, especially the right way to live and organize society. By metonymy it then comes to refer to a linguistic account of a way, or the right way, to do something. Now, eventually “dao” also comes to refer to some sort of metaphysical entity that is responsible for both the way the universe is and the way it ought to be. However, there was a fad a few years ago of people arguing that “dao” never referred to a metaphysical entity in the seminal period when Confucianism and Daoism first originated. I knew this revisionist claim was obviously false, and so I did a search of occurrences of the expression in early texts, and I noticed something particularly interesting about the use of the term in passage 25 of the Daodejing:

There is a thing that is amorphous yet complete,

Born before Heaven and Earth.

Still! Alone!

Standing alone and unchanging,

Going everywhere without being in danger.

It can be considered the mother of Heaven and Earth.

I do not know its name.

I bestow upon it the courtesy name of “Way.”

This passage settles the issue that was under debate because it unambiguously identifies the Way as a cosmogonic principle that existed before and created the physical universe (“Heaven and Earth”). However, it is also interesting because it states that there is no “name” for this entity, so the author bestows upon it the “courtesy name” of the “Way.” A “courtesy name” (zi, also called a “style”) is a polite name you use to address someone whom you are not on familiar terms with. Consequently, this passage records the origin of the appropriation of the term “Way” to refer to this metaphysical principle that is “the mother of Heaven and Earth.”

You might say that my argument received the highest form of flattery: someone who took part in the original online debate plagiarized my argument. Ironically, I was invited to review the anthology in which he published his appropriation of my view. In my review, I discreetly stated that he was “developing a line of argument” that I had expressed to him before.

The worst!

The third point I am especially fond of discovering (actually re-discovering, as it turned out) is the meaning behind a seminal line from the Confucian classic, the Great Learning, which says that one should hate evil “like hating a hateful odor,” and love the good “like loving a lovely sight (se).” The point of the first simile is that our hatred of evil should be as emotionally visceral and as spontaneous as our revulsion toward a disgusting odor. If I pour myself some milk and smell that it has gone bad, I don’t have to wrestle with the temptation to drink it; I forcefully and spontaneously throw the milk out. The point of the simile from the Great Learning is that my attitude toward something that is morally evil should be equally negative, spontaneous, and decisive.

The meaning of the second simile is less obvious, though. Some translators, like Wing-tsit Chan, translate the line as meaning that you should love the good “like loving a beautiful color.” The Chinese word “se” can mean color, but what would it mean to love the good like you love a beautiful color? All I can imagine is someone’s positive but tepid reaction to “the lovely shade of blue” you’ve painted your bathroom. But how is this parallel to one’s visceral reaction to a disgusting odor?

So what is actually going on in the passage, in your opinion?

What I eventually realized is that the word “se” is being used here in one of its other senses, where it means lust or the physical beauty that is the object of lust. Now the parallel between the similes is clear. We should hate evil as spontaneously and decisively as we are repulsed by a disgusting odor and we should love the good as spontaneously and decisively as erotic attraction.

After I figured this out, I was looking at some passages in which “se” means lust and I noticed something I had missed before. In one Analects passage, Confucius laments that he has never met anyone whose love of Virtue is as strong as his lust (se). In his commentary on the passage, Zhu Xi links this remark to the Great Learning passage: “Loving Virtue like one loves physical beauty (se) – this is to Sincerely love Virtue. However, people are seldom able to do this.”

Any exciting new projects in the works?

My next project is to finish a book I have been working on for years, which I affectionately refer to as my “magnum dopus” (sic). It’s an effort to synthesize Thomistic Aristotelianism, Confucianism, Daoism, and Huayan Buddhism.

Ambitious! Possible?

That concern is justified, and certainly there are genuine inconsistencies between complete, traditional formulations of each of these positions. However, I hope to show that one can extract elements from each view to create something novel and plausible. I sketched part of this project in an essay, “Anthropocentric Realism about Values,” which I wrote for a festschrift in honor of Joel Kupperman, Moral Cultivation and Confucian Character, edited by Chenyang Li and Peimin Ni.

Is philosophy dead?

Absolutely not. In fact, I am more optimistic about the future of philosophy than I have been in years. Enrolments in philosophy courses and philosophy majors seem to be dwindling in the US, but there is some evidence that there has been a bounceback, and that we are finally starting to get more women and people of color in philosophy. Beyond that, two things give me great confidence about the future of philosophy.

First, for most of my career I have found that almost all other philosophers in the English-speaking world were dogmatically resistant to the fact that there are indigenous philosophical traditions in China, India, Africa, and the Americas. However, in the last few years I am finding more and more philosophers and students of philosophy—including undergraduates, doctoral students, assistant professors, and even some full professors—who are much more open minded and receptive to the existence and value of philosophy outside the Anglo-European mainstream. It really looks to me like we are on the edge of a sea-change in how philosophy is taught and studied in the English-speaking world. The environment is genuinely substantially different, and this was reflected in the surprisingly large number of job openings in philosophy this year in what I label the “Less Commonly Taught Philosophies.”

Modern language teachers use the expression “Less Commonly Taught Languages” (LCTL) as a convenient label for languages like Arabic, Hindi, Japanese, Swahili, and Tagalog that don’t have anything special in common culturally or historically but are similar in the unfortunate respect that they are less often taught in the West, especially in primary and secondary school but even in colleges and universities. I coined the label “Less Commonly Taught Philosophies” (LCTP) for traditions like East Asian, South Asian, African, and Indigenous American philosophies that don’t have anything in common except the fact that they have been systematically excluded from the canon in the Anglo-European world.

Other people use labels like “Non-Western philosophy” or “Non-Canonical Philosophy,” but there are disadvantages to each of these expressions. For example, are Islamic philosophy and Jewish philosophy “non-Western”? Both are very influenced by the Greco-Roman tradition, and have been practiced by communities that lived in Europe. Zera Yacob lived in Ethiopia, but he was a Christian. (Ethiopians proudly point out that they were Christian before most people in Europe were.). So is he “Western” or not? Other terms like “non-canonical” or “non-mainstream” seem to me problematic because they might be seen as implicitly accepting the current conception of the “canon” or the “mainstream.”

The second reason you think philosophy has a bright future?

I like to warn my students against the common misconception that philosophy is about people discussing intellectual puzzles that have no practical relevance. It’s true that philosophy can degenerate into intellectual masturbation, but truly important philosophy is always grounded in passionate human concerns. Confucians like Mengzi and Daoists like Zhuangzi philosophized because they lived in the Warring States Period, a time of bloody interstate and intrastate conflict, and they wanted to find the right Way to solve the problem of how to live. Plato says in the Seventh Letter that he was driven to philosophize by the corruption he saw among both the democratic and anti-democratic governments in Athens in the aftermath of the catastrophic Peloponnesian War. Descartes explained that he was led to conduct his Meditations on First Philosophy because so many things he had taken for granted had turned out to be false, or at least dubious. His readers would know that he was talking about how their world had been wracked by the rise of the New Science, the Protestant Reformation, and rapidly changing political and economic structures.

How is this relevant to philosophy today?

My point is that chaotic eras invariably produce great philosophers, and we currently live in a chaotic era. In particular, two issues strike me as particularly pressing: how to understand and combat the resurgence of fascist populism in the Western democracies, and how to embrace multiculturalism.

These are multidimensional problems that require multidimensional solutions, but humans live and act in a world shaped by their beliefs, values, and theories, and philosophy will always be an important aspect of how we generate, shape, and defend our worldviews. Consequently, I think it would be unprecedented historically if our current era of uncertainty and conflict did not produce several generations of brilliant philosophers. I wonder which first-year undergraduate student right now will be the next Xunzi, Śāntideva, Hypatia, or Zera Yacob?

How are you dealing with the pandemic?

Well, I don’t know about other people, but I’m not enjoying it.

Favorite books?

I guess it is cheating if I list a book traditionally classified as philosophy, so I think I’d say George Orwell’s 1984. It’s a dark book, of course, but I find myself quoting and referring to it all the time. I’m also a big fan of Voltaire’s Candide. It’s the intellectual antecedent of everything from Monty Python to South Park. And if I can sneak a philosophical classic in there, I’ll add Augustine’s Confessions. It’s the original autobiography, a fascinating story of a great man’s life, as well as a deep work of philosophical psychology and theology.

Are you religious?

I guess I would say “spiritual but not religious,” but I hate using this phrase because it sounds like something you would say on a dating website profile. I was raised Roman Catholic. In fact, my mother believed in demonic possession, and when I was young I did too. I don’t anymore, of course, but to this day I find movies about possession, like The Exorcist and The Conjuring, especially scary (even though I love watching them). I lost my faith when I was an adolescent. However, I have become convinced by the argument of William James in “The Will to Believe” that, in the absence of compelling reason for or against the existence of God, we may choose to believe in God if we find that belief comforting. So I choose to believe.

So you like horror movies with a supernatural theme. What about other movies?

I really like Casablanca. Humphrey Bogart is inimitable as the apparent cynic but with a heart of gold. It has it all: romance, intrigue, heroism—even humor. When Rick is being interrogated by the Gestapo they ask, “Why did you come to Casablanca?”

“I came for the water.”

“There is no water in Casablanca!”

“I was misinformed.”

Any other favorites?

I’m a fan of some of the great classic “philosophical” films, like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The Seventh Seal, and Rashomon. Among more recent films, I ran across Cloud Atlas while channel surfing and it blew my mind. And, of course, Bill Murray’s character in Lost in Translation is based on me.

False!

No, of course not, but I love the film. It captures the feeling, which I often have, of being in another culture and being simultaneously charmed, confused, delighted, stuck, free, and utterly lost. I also am a huge fan of films-so-bad-they-are good. The first time my wife and I watched Tommy Wisseau’s The Room, we were laughing so hard ten minutes in that we could barely breathe. I’ve also seen Ed Wood’s Plan 9 from Outer Space at least a dozen times, and Nguyen’s Birdemic at least six times (so far). Given my interest in films like these, I’m obviously a Mystery Science Theater 3000 fan as well.

TV shows?

When I have time for entertainment media, I mostly tend to listen to podcasts and Youtube content providers. The one podcast I invariably listen to is How Did This Get Made, which is some comedians discussing bad films. On Youtube I follow Jenny Nicholson, whose channel has very diverse content, including Disneyland news, parodies, movie reviews, and readings of bad, self-published fiction. I was very disappointed recently when CollegeHumor, a company that does short-form sketch comedy on Youtube, went out of business. When I was younger, some of my favorite shows included Star Trek and Monty Python’s Flying Circus. I don’t watch too much regular TV anymore, but I do love almost everything Seth MacFarlane does. Of course, I watched The Good Place, but I think that is a professional requirement. Rick and Morty is pretty awesome; you just have to ignore most of its fanbase.

Wubba lubba dub dub!

Well, then, you better get schwifty!

Ha! Music?

Friends who are into music have mercilessly mocked my taste, which can be very banal. However, I can appreciate a wide variety of good music, from classic rock and roll like The Who and Bob Dylan to Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart.

Art in general?

I generally like classic representational art, but I can appreciate some modern and conceptual art. I checked out the Tate Museum the last time I was in London and there was some very clever stuff there. A few years ago I discovered Od Nerdrum, who paints surreal scenes but in a renaissance style. I find his work very evocative. Obviously I enjoy East Asian art.

Last meal?

Do you mean “what was the last meal I ate?” or “what would I choose for a last meal if I were being executed?” I just got off a flight where the meal was lamb shank with steamed vegetables. If it were my last meal, I would probably choose fried or baked chicken and mashed potatoes, which is my go-to comfort food.

Thanks for your time, Bryan!

[interviewer: Cliff Sosis]