What Is It Like to Be a Philosopher?

In this interview, Jonathan Ichikawa, Professor of Philosophy at University of British Columbia, discusses growing up Christian during the satanic panic, making use mention errors (when he was 4 years old), Star Trek, divine foreknowledge and free will, starring in a high school production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, going to Rice University, his first philosophy class taught by a future colleague, becoming an atheist, harboring libertarian sympathies, opera, 9/11, feminism, developing an interest in Cognitive Science, considering a career in law, applying to grad school in philosophy, privilege and the role luck in his career, impostor syndrome, working with Ernie Sosa at Brown, starting and working on the popular blog Fake Barn Country, Christa Peterson, the International Gilbert and Sullivan Festival, moving to Rutgers where he started working with Brian Weatherson and Jason Stanley, polyamory and jealousy, intuitions, epistemology, the Arché Research Centre in St Andrews, meeting his wife Carrie, developing an interest in social and political applied philosophy, how Hume and Descartes influence the status quo, Terry Pratchett, Arabian Nights, and the question he would ask an honest omniscient being…

[11/11/2021]

So, where did you grow up? Religious household?

I was born in 1981 in Walnut Creek, California. My family was very religious — Protestant Evangelical. Most of the media I remember from my childhood was explicitly Christian. I remember audio cassette children's stories from Focus on the Family, and bizarre videos featuring Psalty the Singing Songbook. This was the time of the 1980s "Satanic Panic"; I remember being afraid of most secular media, because demonic forces might lurk within it.

Where was this coming from?

My mother, I believe, was the original religious impetus in the household. She died when I was four. (Her religious influence on my father persisted long after her life.) I have some of her diaries and writings from before and during my early life — she was very animated by worries about evil in the world. Opposition to abortion was a particular passion. I actually have a photo of myself as a toddler at an anti-abortion rally. I don't think she would have been happy to learn about the politics that I eventually grew into.

Dad?

My father's family is Japanese-American (his parents were interned during the war — and Grandpa joined the US army and fought in Europe). My father worked as a chemical engineer before transitioning into corporate management, with lots of church activism on the side. He remarried when I was ten.

What were you like as a little kid?

I don't remember much at all of my early childhood firsthand, so I'll answer this question based on my mother's diaries and family stories. I think I was a fairly serious child, and an inquisitive one. My mother wrote about me testing the house rules somewhat methodically, deliberately showing her what I had done to see if it would result in having my hand hit with a spatula. This was when I was almost one and a half years old. (It is obvious from her writings that this discipline came from love, but as an adult I think she had some pretty funny ideas about what is good for a child.) I had some performing instincts. I was interested in learning how things work.

Any sign you’d become a philosopher?

My family noticed early on that I was curious, and interested in abstract questions. In retrospect these certainly look like early signs of a proclivity for philosophy. For example, I know that I puzzled a bit over context-sensitive language — one of my eventual research topics — talking about how confusing it is that tomorrow keeps becoming today. These were obvious use–mention errors, but I was four years old. I also reinvented some of the classic philosophical puzzles that children often discover: what was it like before God? How can I tell if other people experience things the same way I do?

What were you interested in?

Unfortunately I don't really remember anything about what I liked to do as a young child. I know from my school reports that I had some behaviour trouble, and challenges socializing with other children. When I was around 12 or 13 or so, I got very into Star Trek. That was my "thing" in middle school. Everyone mentioned it in my yearbook.

Why is Picard the best Star Trek captain?

It’s bold of you to assume! But yeah actually, Picard is the best Star Trek captain. I appreciate him for his teamwork leadership; he insists on very high standards of competence, but recognizes that this can come in different forms, and he brings out the best in people. There are lots of examples, but two come immediately to mind. One is his insistence, over the objections of some of his staff, of continuing to work with Lieutenant Barclay, who is suffering from serious anxiety and other mental health problems. Picard recognizes him as a person who is struggling but who has important skills to offer. Another example I remember is his navigation of cultural differences in a high-stress environment when a Benzite ensign comes aboard as part of an exchange program. And Picard’s new series showcases a new level of integrity, perseverance, and self-sacrifice that I also admire a lot; it actually reminds me a bit of the superhero genre, which I also enjoy.

As a teenager, did you get into any trouble?

My parents did quite a thorough job of keeping me pretty sheltered as a teenager. I went to high school in Midland, Michigan — a somewhat unusual small city. It has a very white suburban vibe — it has 40,000 people and over 40 Christian churches — even though there is no major city anywhere nearby. (It's the headquarters of the Dow Chemical corporation, and brings in a lot of upper-middle class professionals, including my father.) When I say I was sheltered, I don't just mean I didn't go out partying and drinking and doing drugs — I mean, I didn't even know at the time that other high school students did things like that. (I was very surprised, when I got to college, to discover how unusual my social background was!)

So I didn't have many opportunities to get into what most people would think of as "trouble". But I was disciplined for things like getting a speeding ticket or a B in a course. That discipline usually took the form of a prohibition from pursuing various extracurricular activities around high school. And I did a lot of extracurriculars.

Tell me about these extra curriculars…

I saw a tweet recently that said philosophers were either former debate nerds or former theater nerds, but I was both, along with band (marching and jazz), forensics (speech competitions), German club, student union, and the cross country team. I was also in a fife and drum corps, and a county youth leadership program. My high school memories are full of exciting achievements — playing the lead in the musicals, emceeing the school variety show, playing solos as concertmaster in band, winning speech and debate awards and competitions. I was an OK runner, about average on our cross-country team. I remember being very upset when I got a B in English, because it meant that I wasn't allowed to be in the musical the next term. I convinced my parents to at least let me play in the pit orchestra. My main source of fun was performing and competing. I loved it all but I think I loved being on stage the best. One particular highlight, maybe the thing I enjoyed the most, was playing the title role in our production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.

Favorite classes?

When I think about my favourite classes, it's less about the material than it is about the teachers. I had an English teacher, Mr. Daly, whom I adored — partly because he was dry and funny, but also partly, I think, because he was sort of opening up big questions about life and value that I found myself very attracted to. I remember coordinating with some of my classmates to nominate him for a teaching award one year, which he won. We’ve kept in touch; he happened to visit Vancouver a few years ago and we had brunch. I also remember really enjoying my math classes.

Were you still religious in high school?

I continued to identify as a Christian through high school, but I remember starting to experience some intellectual dissatisfaction about theological matters. I was one of those weird Christian kids who actually read the Bible — not just the handful of passages picked out for sermons — and I think my youth group leaders didn't know what to do with a lot of my questions. I remember wanting to get into questions about divine foreknowledge and free will: if God already has a plan for me and knows what I'm going to do, then how can my decisions be free? I was frustrated as a teenager that no one seemed able to give me a good answer — or even to take the question seriously. (Ironically enough, I'm a happy compatibilist about free will these days.) On at least one occasion I ended up setting up an anonymous email address to ask our pastor some follow-up questions about a sermon. He did actually reply, but not in a way I found satisfactory.

I continued going through the Christian motions at this stage in my life, but I think I intellectually checked out from the church a bit as a teenager. Once I was in college and out of the house, it didn't take me long to realize I wasn't very invested in religion. I have much more specific critiques of the religious tradition I grew up in now — largely from a feminist point of view — but those considerations weren't on my radar at all as a teenager. Or, the few that were, I was on the wrong side of.

Did you start thinking about what you wanted to do in college, if college was even on the table? Where did you apply?

In my family there was basically no question about whether I would go to college. I don't recall ever wondering or deciding — that was just obviously the path laid out for me. My parents were doing a lot of strong directing at this stage; I'm not sure I ever spent much time thinking about what I wanted to do or study. The pre-college period looks mostly like a parent-driven whirlwind in my memory now. My grades were good-not-great, but my test scores were great, and I'd won some awards and scholarships and things, so my parents had high educational ambitions for me. I applied widely — I forget how many places now but I'd guess it was 10–20. I didn't get admitted to the most elite institutions — I think Stanford and Princeton were on the list, if memory serves — but I had plenty of good options. I ended up going to Rice University, in Houston, TX. I don't think I chose this, exactly; it was a family decision.

What did you plan on studying?

I am now surprised to remember that I applied to and entered university with an intention to study computer science. I'm not completely sure why; I didn't have any particular experience in that field. I didn't know how to code. (I still don't, which tells you something about how well that plan went.) I think my parents thought that was a good career path. And I had been good at math. I remember being interested in teaching, but I was discouraged from that sort of career.

Any major world events--political, technological, cultural changes or trends, etc.--that had a significant impact on your life and worldview before college?

Strangely enough, I can't think of any. I don't think I was paying much attention to the broader world before college. I recall a vague awareness of a few world events in the 80s and 90s, but nothing that had much of an impression on me that I can recall.

If the guy you were when you graduated high school met the guy you are now, what would he recognize? What would surprise him?

This is a question I've thought a lot about, but I'm still not sure what to say. Certainly there are many respects in which I am very, very different from him. He loved to be the center of attention and was not at all self-conscious about seizing it. I... well if I'm being honest I still love being the center of attention, but I am shy, and think a lot more about whether I'm using more than my fair share of the oxygen in the room. I think he was a lot more joyful and passionate and carefree than I am. He wore a boot on his head to school one day, just to do something different. I feel a lot more responsibility, and am often depressed, and get very anxious when I don't know my social place. He enjoyed arguing recreationally. He was a little bit of the stereotype of That Guy in philosophy courses. But me, I hate conflict and instinctively avoid it. This may be a surprise to people who know me from my online activism. Obviously I do sometimes engage in conflict and argument, but it is out of felt obligation, and never for fun.

He was also, as far as I can tell and remember, pretty apolitical. My adult engagement with feminism, organized labour, and other anti-oppressive activism is a big part of my life now. But I don't think I was thinking about these kinds of questions at all when I was a teenager. Certainly my teenage self would have been surprised to learn that these issues are a big part of my life now. I'm curious how he would have felt about it. I'm sure the seeds were there, but I just don't remember thinking about this stuff. I'm really interested in looking for the points of continuity between my earlier psychology and my later life. This is something I’ve been discussing with my therapist quite a bit.

I was recently reminded that one of my good friends in high school disclosed a childhood sexual assault to me. I hope I responded in an appropriately sensitive way. I guess she saw something in me that she thought seemed trustworthy.

I do think my teenage self wouldn't have been surprised that I became a professor. That would have made sense to him.

Good answer! So, how was Rice? Did you feel prepared?

It was a really big and welcome transition. I wasn't prepared, in the sense of already having developed the skills necessary to thrive there, but I was very ready to start developing them and practice making some decisions on my own. I mentioned before that I had had quite a sheltered social life up to that point; the idea of just deciding for myself where and when and with whom to go out, and for how long, was exciting. I wasn't fluent in the party scene, or popular music, or drinking or dating or hooking up, but it was interesting to be around it and to be able to visit that world, even though I would always feel like a bit of an outsider in it.

As for academics, I discovered, more slowly than would have been ideal, that I was actually quite unprepared. I had never really developed what one might call study habits; I excelled in high school by paying attention in class and being clever. That didn't cut it in most of my college courses, especially the math and science ones, especially since I wasn't totally reliable about going to class. But when I was in class I paid attention and felt like I understood, which I think gave me a false sense of security about some of the material. I also had a bad habit of forgetting to do my homework (or worse, to turn it in). It took me a year or so to learn how to study (and to recognize when I needed to). I benefited from a pretty lax add/drop policy at Rice, and was able to get through without too much harm to my transcript.

Favorite classes and inspirational teachers? How did you discover philosophy? What was the hook?

I took my first philosophy course my first term, quite by chance — there was a gap in my schedule and I wanted to pick an interesting elective for it, and I had a friend who was enrolled in an intro-level philosophy and cognitive science course, so I came along and joined it. That course was actually taught by Eric Margolis, who is now my colleague at UBC. I enjoyed the course and did well in it. Unlike the science classes, this course did reward my high school strategy of just coming to class and paying attention and being clever. (Not all philosophy courses are like this though!) I didn't have any early intention of being a philosophy major, but I kept taking philosophy courses as electives, because I enjoyed them and did well in them.

Did you consider doing anything other than philosophy?

I went through a lot of ideas about majors during my time at Rice. I came in thinking Computer Science, but realized pretty quickly that that wasn't going to work out for me. I sometimes wonder how things would have turned out if I'd come in with the academic discipline to really learn the material in my first couple of courses. Then I was on a business/management track for a while, then decided I wanted to major in Political Science.

Following that philosophy course, I became interested in Cognitive Science, which was an interdisciplinary major at Rice, so I started taking Linguistics, and Psychology, and Neuroscience, and more Philosophy of Mind. Rice has a pretty robust culture of double or even triple majoring, so I cycled through various permutations of majors throughout my four years. The Cognitive Science major was my main organizational framework, insofar as I had one at all, in my course selection.

I also wasn't doing a lot of thinking about post-college career plans. I sort of ended up on a pre-law track. I worked in the summers, and part-time during the terms, for a publishing company that produced legal texts, so I was doing some careful reading of code books and court decisions and legislative changes. It was while I was working that job during a summer between grad school terms that I think I became the first person in the world to notice that Texas accidentally banned marriage in 2005.

I actually didn't decide to pursue a Philosophy major (double with Cognitive Science) until my last year at Rice, when I decided I was interested in Philosophy graduate programs. I had taken a lot of philosophy courses by that point, either for the Cog Sci degree or as electives, so this wasn't too hard — but it did mean taking some of the required intro-level courses in my last year as a more experienced undergraduate student. I also was the kind of student who talks a lot in class, so I'm sure I annoyed my classmates and professors.

How did you grow as a student?

Honestly when I look back on that time, I'm sort of surprised I made it through in four years and a double major, considering how unfocused I was academically. Coming in with a good amount of AP credit helped. But I was really just starting to grow up, and grow into an intellectual identity. I enjoyed learning and took a playful attitude towards it. It was enough to carry me through a BA.

What did your parents make of your decision to major in philosophy?

I don't think my dad and my step-mother were thrilled about the idea, but since I didn't actually have or announce that idea until late in my undergraduate career, when I was pretty clearly planning on postgraduate study anyway, I think it went down a little easier than it might have. I was thinking about both law school and Philosophy PhD programs.

Overall, in college, how did your views change? Like, your relationship to religion, for instance?

Religion just sort of fizzled out of my life once I got to college. For maybe a month or two I spent a little time and energy exploring the local churches, because I came in still thinking that was the kind of thing that would be important to me. And I participated in some events with some of the campus Christian groups. But none of it excited me, and without the family pressure to pull me along, I eventually realized that I didn't care. I think I remember being interested in defending some of my Christian beliefs in some of my philosophy courses along the way, so some of my Christian identity lingered for a while, but basically throughout my teens, spanning both high school and college, I very gradually became an atheist.

Sex in college?

I did start to learn about sex, and drinking, in college — both somewhat carefully and gradually. I didn't have the kind of dramatic backlash to a sheltered upbringing that one sometimes hears about. (I did have a girlfriend in high school, but in a relatively chaste way. We talked on the phone a lot, and kissed at the prom.) Alcohol was pretty anticlimactic at the time; I think I had enough lingering fear about it that I drank pretty moderately in college. (I have stories about drinking to excess, but they start in grad school.) I didn't really encounter other drugs. I don't think I struck people as the type to offer them to, and I didn't seek them out.

Sex and relationships were a bigger change. Late in my first year at Rice, I started seeing someone I'd met in a ballroom dance class. I didn't have the wisdom or the vocabulary to be very clear or specific about what kind of relationship that was, or to even know to have a conversation about it. I think in my head, we kissed and had sex a few times, and so now we were boyfriend and girlfriend. This is the first part of my autobiography I've described here that I'm now pretty embarrassed by; I was extremely naive about relationships. We went to our respective homes over the summer and didn't stay in touch, and when I saw her again in the fall she was with somebody else.

The next year I got into a more conventional monogamous relationship that persisted, with some off and on, for the rest of my time at Rice. I still had what I now consider to be a quite limited perspective on the possibilities and choices available for relationships. Even though I'd pretty well decided that I wasn't worried about the Christian ideas about sex and marriage I'd grown up with, I hadn't yet developed a critique of broader conventional assumptions about relationships — or even recognized that they were assumptions. I'd say that as I finished my time as an undergraduate, I was just very gradually beginning to become aware that there was a broader space of relationship options.

Were you still into music and theatre in college?

Absolutely. I played in Rice's marching band — the Marching Owl Band (MOB) is a joke-based 'scatter' band, that runs goofily into formations. I was also involved in writing the scripts for our halftime shows, and was the stadium announcer for some performances. I also did a lot of musical theater and comic opera — mostly performing, but with some writing and directing in there too. My third year, I assembled and directed a comic opera adaptation of Dr. Seuss's The Butter-Battle Book, using music from Gilbert & Sullivan operettas. My best friend and I founded a campus light opera society. (Emily is now an accomplished opera conductor.) Theatre, especially musical theatre, was a big part of my college life.

Were you into politics?

I remained pretty apolitical through most of college. I'd actually developed some libertarian sympathies — largely out of an intellectual interest in some temptingly simple and elegant ideas about markets and supply and demand. It wouldn't take me too long to notice that empirical social reality did not confirm those a priori social ideas, but for a few years I found them pretty convincing. (I recall a political philosophy course in which George Sher seemed just astounded that I wanted to try to defend libertarian approaches to political philosophy on utilitarian grounds.) I had no interest in questions about Democrats and Republicans. This was a few years after it aired, but the 1996 Treehouse of Horror episode where the Presidential candidates are Kodos and Kang still felt funny and relevant — there was no relevant difference to choose between the candidates. ("Well, I believe I'll vote for a third-party candidate." "Go ahead, throw your vote away!! ha ha ha".)

Did 9/11 not galvanize you, politically?

I do remember being afraid after 9/11, but not directing that energy in any particularly political way. But by the time of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, I'd started to develop something of a political consciousness. I wasn't leading protests or anything, but I shared the sense, with my friends and classmates, that the Bush Administration might be leading us into a grave mistake. I wouldn't say these ideas occupied a big proportion of my time or thought though.

How did you get into feminism?

As far as I can remember, I was also first exposed to feminism in anything like a sympathetic way as an undergrad. (Before that, I think maybe I heard only a few passing references to it in church, and the occasional Rush Limbaugh rant on the radio.) I didn't have any kind of formal study of it, but I remember some conversations with friends about some of the very basics. My girlfriend had a "this is what a feminist looks like" t-shirt. I also remember that one of my classmates was leading a campaign to phase out some rapey college chants that had been passed down through the years. I didn’t see what the big deal was at the time, but I consider her a hero in retrospect.

Did you start thinking what you were going to do after you graduated?

I didn't decide what to do after college until my fourth and last year as an undergrad. I hadn't been focused on that question until then — I was just enjoying living and being in college — but it eventually became obvious that I needed a plan. Law school was an obvious choice — I was creative and analytical and a good literal reader, and I had been working with legal texts in my summer job. But as I started thinking more seriously about it, and talking to the lawyers I knew, and thinking about student debt and work lifestyle, etc., the idea of pursuing law professionally left me pretty cold. I think I probably would have enjoyed law school, but I'm at all not sure I would have enjoyed working as a lawyer. So even as I stayed halfway on that track — I took the LSAT and started collecting law school applications — I started to explore other ideas too. I asked my philosophy professors a few questions about philosophy grad school, and got some good advice and guidance (some from my current colleague Eric Margolis again). I decided in the fall I'd apply to law programs and philosophy programs, and choose between them later, but decided at the last minute not to send off law school applications.

What philosophy programs were you looking into?

I was open-minded about where to go for my philosophy PhD. I applied all around the United States. I didn't have very specific ideas about what kind of philosophy in particular I was interested in, but my writing sample was in ethics — wrestling with questions about how to think about welfare when the number of people who exist is one of the variables, looking at Parfit's "Repugnant Conclusion", etc. I ended up with a few good offers to choose between, and decided to go to Brown. I did not end up focusing particularly on ethics at Brown — I worked primarily on epistemology with Ernie Sosa — but recently I've found my way back to ethics.

In retrospect I think I was quite rash in enrolling in a PhD program, and in choosing Brown in particular. I didn't really do my homework at all. I didn't know much about academia, and had only the vaguest sense of what it's like to be a professor or how hard it is to become one, and I never even visited Brown before accepting my offer. They offered to fly me out for a visit, but the dates conflicted with an operetta I was working on that spring. I would certainly not advise anyone today to make their decisions the way I did. Then again, today, someone with ideas about philosophy as unfocused as I had at the time wouldn't have been admitted to a good PhD program anyway. I just moved across the country by myself to an area I'd never been, without really having any idea what I was getting into. Things worked out, though; I was lucky. I ended up really enjoying my colleagues and faculty and work at Brown.

Yeah, sounds like you weren’t too worried?

Probably this is obvious from lots of this narrative, but I went through my education with a lot of privilege. I benefited from a lot of lucky breaks — some of which I haven’t mentioned yet — and unearned matches between the particular intellectual skills I happened to have and the traits that many philosophers valued. I also went to a prestigious undergraduate institution, paid for by my parents. I mention this not because I think there's anything wrong with having such a background — we all come from where we come from — but it's very salient to me that as far as my academic career goes, I've had an exceptionally lucky go of things, one that doesn't provide much of a useful roadmap for others to try to follow. I hope that I use my privilege in a responsible and conscious way.

So, you weren't as prepared for undergrad as you thought. Was grad school what you expected?

On the whole, I really enjoyed my time at Brown. I was 21 (and young for 21) when I started my PhD. But I went into it sort of expecting to be surrounded by philosophers who liked talking about philosophy, and that's exactly what I got. The grad students there had an active and lively community, and I divided my time between taking seminars and going to the grad centre bar with my classmates. For the most part I think I performed well in those courses, although I do remember noticing that I needed to step up my reading and studying habits another notch or two.

Philosophically, what was trending at Brown, and in general?

I think some of the implications of epistemic externalism, especially in its more thoroughgoing forms, were starting to reverberate through epistemology. Ernie Sosa was developing some very interesting ideas about dreaming and imagination, and teasing out surprising epistemic consequences from them; they had deep connections to perceptual disjunctivism and epistemic externalism that it took me a long time to really understand. Timothy Williamson's Knowledge and Its Limits was also a pretty new book when I was in grad school; it would take a few years for it to be widely understood, but we felt its waves and worked through some of them. Williamson came to Brown and delivered the Blackwell–Brown lectures while I was there — these would go on to become The Philosophy of Philosophy. I also took a grad seminar with Josh Schechter on the a priori around that time, and so had a good opportunity to put a few thoughts together about apriority and thought experiments and fiction. My classmate — and roommate — Ben Jarvis and I wrote up a paper on the topic that became one of my first publications. (It would also develop into a major research project that kept Ben and me busy together for many years.) We were sort of in the right place at the right time to get that idea out at a moment when the literature was interested in it. It felt like most of the PhD students when I was at Brown were working with either Ernie Sosa on epistemology, or Jaegwon Kim on philosophy of mind.

Favorite classes/teachers? What was the dissertation on? Who was your dissertation advisor?

I got along well with Ernie Sosa, who would become my dissertation advisor, right away. I took his epistemology seminar my first year, and then again every year after that for the rest of my graduate career. My first term paper for Ernie was on dreaming and imagination — I mentioned that it took me years to understand the significance of his work there, but I caught on quickly to a few small pieces of it, and developed some thoughts in response into my first paper on skepticism. (I now agree with very little of that paper.) We also read some work on imagination generally, which let me bring to bear some of my background in cognitive science on epistemology. That became the organizing theme for my research in grad school — ways in which thinking about imagination can connect to traditional epistemic questions.

Ernie had been full-time at Brown and half-time at Rutgers for some years when I arrived at Brown. But he did move full-time to Rutgers (and entirely away from Brown) while I was there. He offered to support me in a transfer to Rutgers, and even to help transfer my course credit so the move wouldn't delay my completion, so at the end of my third year at Brown, I moved to Rutgers. As some philosophers will know, this was considered a major step up, prestige-wise — Brown's PhD program was very respectable, but Rutgers's was world-class. I had applied to that program out of undergrad, but not been successful. This was another moment of pure, unearned luck in my career.

Was grad school in general, or writing the dissertation, challenging? Advice for graduate students?

I'm sort of reluctant to admit it, but I actually didn't find grad school or my dissertation particularly challenging, at least on the academic side. (I did find it a bit more difficult emotionally.) I know that many students struggle for many good reasons, and that almost nobody has it as lucky as I did. I found that I had a knack for developing ideas into papers, and I never felt short of ideas. I was doing some philosophy blogging, both on my personal blog and on a group grad student blog back in the day — Fake Barn Country, if any readers remember it — and engagement with peers and professors helped me sort out the ideas that had legs from those not worth bothering with. And once I hit on my dissertation theme — imagination and epistemology — ideas for chapters just kept falling out of my head: dream skepticism, thought experiments, knowledge of counterfactuals, conceivability arguments, relevant alternatives...

Fake Barn Country was great, dude.

Oh, you remember it! Thanks! Yeah I was one of the handful of people driving FBC — I was there at the Brown Grad Center Bar when we decided to launch it. I'm afraid I can't remember whose idea the name was. It might have been Allan Hazlett, but I'm not sure. I sort of regret that the archive was lost — it would be an interesting artifact now. No doubt I made some arguments there I'd be embarrassed about in retrospect though.

The philosophy blogs where people would brainstorm and debate about stuff were useful, no doubt, but today, is the internet and social media--which you are fairly active on--good or bad for philosophy?

I'm not sure how to answer this question. The internet and social media are such a big part of our world that things would be radically different, in ways it's hard to predict, if we didn't have them. But let me try to give at least a partial answer. Let's take the pieces separately.

I think I have to say that the internet on the whole is good for philosophy. Without it, our work would be disseminated only through paper journals and books, and it be much more insular. We would mostly converse with the people geographically close to us, plus the occasional long-distance phone call. I'm in a weekly feminist philosophy of language reading group that usually has participants from 3–4 continents; I also talk about philosophy with other colleagues around the world via email and chat literally every day. And really critical consciousness-raising efforts, like "What is it like to be a woman in philosophy?" blog, have played key roles in recognizing the role of our discipline in many injustices, and motivated some efforts to improve things. We still have a lot of work to do, but we're far less complacent about the situation than the discipline on the whole was a couple of decades ago. This isn't because the observations and the ideas are new — feminist philosophers were writing very clearly about them in the 80s and 90s — but they were doing it in journals that were easy for the mainstream to ignore, instead of blogs that are widely read and discussed. Giving all of that up would be a tremendous cost.

Right. What about social media?

Social media is harder to know what to say about; there are tremendous benefits, but also very significant costs. I don't know how to weigh them, but I'll describe some of each.

One of the major pros of social media is the step towards the relative democratization of academic attention and prestige. Cultures are complicated things, and what the culture of academic philosophy like obviously depends in important ways on the attitudes and behaviours of individuals, but how big a role is played by just which individual is a complex matter. Professors, especially those with elite positions, still have by far the most control over very important things like a PhD student's professional prospects in academia. But social media has given others — including junior and temporary faculty, and students — genuine cultural capital. I am really impressed and inspired, for example, by Christa Peterson's activism on twitter having to do with the recent rise to prominence of trans-exclusionary philosophy. In a world without social media, her worries would not have been widely heard. But she's been able to direct a lot of our collective attention in places that, in my opinion, are important to notice. It's unsurprising that this is perceived as threatening to a lot of professors, who aren't used to being criticized by students in a way it's hard to ignore. I'm sure a lot of them would disagree with my calling this a social media 'pro'. I believe in academic freedom and the right to publish work that furthers oppression, but I think a really important part of a discipline's culture consists in how we collectively respond to such work. And a wider and more democratic variety of people can play bigger causal and constitutive roles with respect to what counts as our disciplinary response than would be the case, were there no social media.

I also think social media is a really useful way to help us keep our work grounded, and to engage with people who are not specialists in philosophy. In the particular case of Twitter, one 'pro' I've noticed is practice with succinct and stylistic writing. I think I've gotten better at writing clear sentences that get to the point, in part through the exercise of writing tweets. Though I say this while conscious of a certain long-windedness in some of my replies to your questions!

‘Long-windedness’ welcome here! Cons of social media?

There are two big ones that come immediately to mind. One is the way it tends to incentivize uncharitable interpretations, pile-ons, and abuse; the other is the way it is undermining democracy. Neither of those are philosophy-specific phenomena, but because philosophy is part of the world, they are costs that philosophers bear, just the same as everybody else.

So, back to grad school. Were you encouraged to publish?

I don't remember whether I was actively encouraged to publish, but I think I probably was, at least with respect to my best work. I submitted three papers while I was in grad school, and they all ended up published within a couple years. Three more pieces deriving from my dissertation would eventually be published over the next several years.

Advice?

I struggle with how to think about my good fortune. I know so many people who have had to struggle and work so much more than I did. Some people have imposter syndrome because they think they're secretly insufficiently competent; I have something a little bit like it because I think I didn't suffer enough to deserve what I have. Because I know that my experience with grad school was so unusual, I wouldn't pretend to be able to give a lot of great advice to students based on my experience. I have lots of advice for students based on experience watching students and the profession, but most of that isn't maybe particularly interesting for an autobiographical interview. I guess one thing that I do think people could learn from my experience is the value of frequent, low-stakes, public philosophical writing. I know blogs aren't in fashion anymore, but they were really a great way to practice writing and try things out, and to engage with other philosophers.

What did you do to unwind in grad school?

Both at Brown and at Rutgers, I socialized, and lived, primarily with other philosophy students. We talked, we drank, we partied, we laughed, and we did a lot of philosophy. At the same time, I also continued to develop my passion for singing. I studied opera, and auditioned for musicals and operettas, I co-founded another university light opera society, and I became a regular fixture at the International Gilbert & Sullivan Festival every summer in England. By the end of my time in grad school I started getting cast in amateur and semi-professional grand opera productions. I wasn't an amazing singer, but I had some talent, and good theatric instincts for opera. So rehearsals, performances, and cast parties were a big piece of my social life too. There were a few brief periods where I considered the idea of pursuing singing professionally. I really loved performing a lot. But I also loved philosophy, and I liked the idea of the more stable academic career path. I don’t think there are a lot of people who can say they went into philosophy for its career stability, but that is what I did.

Low points in grad school?

Although I had lots of fun friends that I enjoyed spending time with, and kept busy with singing and academic work, I do have some salient memories of feeling pretty lonely at points in grad school. I wasn't close (either geographically or emotionally) to family, and there were times I felt a salient lack of deeper and comfortable connections. This kind of melancholy and loneliness is still familiar to me now from time to time. I think it started in grad school.

In grad school, how did you change, philosophically?

I don't know if I had enough time or perspective to change much philosophically during grad school. When I think back to that time, my grad school self feels very young. I was growing and learning a lot as an intellectual, but I was still growing into my legs, so to speak. It's not until a bit later, once there was a mature perspective to track, that I can see how things changed.

How did you evolve as a person?

It's easier for me to see the ways I changed personally. For the first time, I was financially independent from my parents, which gave me a lot more latitude to decide for myself how to spend my time. I was also single for an extended period, and had occasion to become more deliberate and thoughtful about what I valued in romantic and sexual relationships. I dated and learned a lot about what people care about, and how they are different, and what might be assumed, and what is better made explicit. This was also the period in my life when I learned that monogamy was a choice, and that there were many ways to build successful relationships. I dated around a lot. I fell in love once or twice. It was a pretty chaotic and unsettled period, but I came out of it with a much more mature perspective on relationships.

I think for many, the thought of their partner with somebody else kills them. Just a cultural hang up?

I'm always a bit puzzled that people think that jealousy is a reason to prefer monogamous relationship styles. As you say, many people suffer from jealousy — but this includes many people in monogamous relationships! So the latter is obviously no guarantee against the former. I don't even think monogamy makes jealousy less likely. The main reason people are anxious about the idea of their partners being with other people is that they are afraid that they'll leave them for those other relationships. A system where you're not allowed to explore interesting and appealing relationship possibilities without blowing up your current relationship first is not a way to be safer from that possibility! I don't think polyamory is for everyone, but I do think that because there is such a very strong social default in favour of monogamy — one I'm convinced it doesn't deserve — pretty much everyone should give these questions much more serious thought than most people do. I think people should be deliberate about what kinds of relationships they want to have with one another. Our intimate, romantic, and sexual lives make such a big difference to our well-being. For me, the knowledge that my partner can explore other relationships and will come back to me provides an incredible feeling of security. And of course the freedom to develop new relationships myself is exciting and fun.

What was the market like when you finished? Ultimate goal at the time? Job market horror stories? Did anybody help you out a lot during this period? Where did you land your first gig?

This is another story of extreme career luck. I started at Brown in 2003, and moved to Rutgers in 2006 as a PhD candidate. My plan was to do most of my dissertation writing in two years, then go on the market my third year. So if you're counting, that means I would have been applying for jobs during what turned out to be the absolutely disastrous post-financial crisis 2009 season. But by pure chance, I escaped that fate. The year before, the Arché Research Centre in St Andrews advertised a 4-year research postdoc for a project on intuitions and philosophical methodology — and I had my publication with Ben on thought experiments, along with dissertation chapters on conceivability arguments, conceptual and empirical arguments about imagination, and more related things. So I applied for exactly one job, the year before the financial crisis. And not just that: two of my committee members who wrote me letters — Brian Weatherson and Jason Stanley — were both employed part-time at Arché at the time. And Ernie was a regular visitor there, and would soon become the official auditor for the project. If God gave you the magical ability to create one job description, and tasked you with the goal to maximize my chances of getting it, you couldn't have done much better than Arché did. I got the job, rushed to finish the dissertation, and moved to Scotland in the summer of 2008.

Wow! Sosa, could you describe Sosa a bit?

Ernie is incredibly warm, and gentle, and insightful. He would read my papers and give them compliments, and then ask a few gentle questions that feel like they're in the spirit of just making conversation. And then the next time I'd go back and reread my paper, I'd realize that his questions had illuminated deep ideas I'd overlooked, or points I'd misunderstood, or issues I'd left vague or incoherent in the paper. Ernie was never remotely aggressive in his criticism — of my ideas, or my classmates', or visiting speakers' — neither was he defensive about his own views. I can't recall ever once seeing him visibly frustrated, or bored, or impatient.

Ernie was a pretty "hands-off" supervisor — I pretty much set my own schedule for what I was working on and when, but he was always prompt and helpful in his feedback. In fact, in retrospect, Ernie was really remarkable in this respect. Now that I have a sense of what it is like to be a professor, with students of my own, I don't know how he did it. Unlike Ernie, I don't have the time pressure of editing two major journals to deal with as well! I e-mailed Ernie at 12:35 am one Saturday night. I'd been staying up late working on my Arché application, and I sent Ernie the paper I wasn’t sure whether to use as my writing sample. I received his encouraging and engaged response — which both set my mind at ease and gave detailed constructive feedback on the paper — at 11:55 am Sunday, the next morning. On another occasion I emailed Ernie a substantive question at 10:39 am about a challenge to a way he’d characterized apriority; he sent me five paragraphs of reply at 11:07. I was unable to find even one example of a question or idea I emailed Ernie, to which his reply took longer than 24 hours. I didn't recognize or appreciate at the time the generosity that he was demonstrating to his students. I wish I could say I am now living up to his example, but I can at least say that I am inspired by it and always trying to do better with my own students.

What's working with Weatherson like?

Brian has an incredible knack for inhabiting others' philosophical projects — a really invaluable skill for graduate supervision. I was really grateful for his habit of occupying my perspective, to help me write the best version of it. A lot of philosophers get stuck on objections, when engaging with work they disagree with. This can be useful when the disagreement is the crux of the paper, but it can be a distraction when it's about some of the more basic presuppositions. Brian had a good ability to see what I was trying to do, and describe my project to me in his own words, in a way that helped me to understand it much better. This is also something that I strive to do with my own students. Brian is also a real philosophical generalist; he's interested in pretty much everything, which makes him a great person to talk to about whatever you're working on.

 Stanley?

Jason is  a whirlwind of energy, both intellectually and personally. When I could seize on a chance to talk to him, we’d have fast-paced and exciting philosophical conversations, peppered with brilliant insights about whatever was on his mind. I learned a lot about sharpening points and making them precise by engaging with Jason. I sat in on a course on conditionals with Jason and Barry Loewer at Rutgers — it turned out to play a significant role in my research a bit later on. My dissertation was on epistemology but touched on language (via contextualism about knowledge ascriptions); I would go on to develop a much deeper interest in that area.

What are philosophical intuitions, and why should we use them as the basis for theorizing about knowledge (and other things)?

So I have a pretty deflationary approach to intuitions and philosophical methodology. I think "intuition" is the label we attach to a judgment, or an inclination to judge, when we're sort of in a skeptical mood about it. So in a way I'm in the same camp as those philosophers who tie intuitions closely to the application of concepts, but some of the discourse in that neighbourhood makes it sound unduly mysterious: "the application of concepts" is just a more complex way of saying "thought". Part of our ability to think about dogs is our (fallible) ability to determine whether the concept DOG applies to various actual or possible things — my hand is not a dog, Drusilla is not a dog, Mezzo is a dog, if Mezzo gave birth to a creature under such-and-such ordinary circumstances, it would be a dog, etc. You can call those judgments "intuitions" if you like, but they're very simple thoughts that it doesn't make much sense to be too skeptical about. I think exactly the same thing about knowledge. Part of what it is to be able to think about knowledge is to be able (fallibly) to identify, in actual and counterfactual cases, what is and is not an instance of knowledge.

That's not to say there aren't deep puzzles about how thought is possible and what makes some thoughts reasonable, and how it is that we have an ability to apply concepts reliably, given that their correct application is often a feature of objective reality. Ben Jarvis and I gave a go at some of those deep questions in our 2013 book. But I do think it's a mistake to think there's a special philosophical problem about reliance on intuition here. The skeptical worry in the neighbourhood is skepticism about thought in general, not just philosophy.

Coming back around to your question, then — why should we use intuitions as the basis for theorizing about knowledge — I want to disambiguate it. I reject the idea that intuitions provide some kind of special data that play quasi-observational foundational roles in philosophy. So in that sense, I don't think intuitions should be the basis for theory. But in a broader sense, I'm happy to agree that philosophical theorizing relies in important and central ways on thinking, and so can be said to rely on "intuitions" in some sense. But this is something that philosophy has in common with literally every intellectual human endeavour.

Got it. So, in general, why is epistemology important?

I think epistemology and ethics together are crucial for the most central practical questions facing humans (and other possible or actual agents): questions about what to do, how to behave, and how to navigate the world. We face an incredible number of decisions; to choose an action rationally, we need to do two things: figure out what's going on — what is happening around us, what the implications of various choices would be, etc. — and figure out what to aim for — which possible outcomes or states of affairs are better and worse. Epistemology, broadly construed, is the study of the norms that govern the former project; ethics, broadly construed, is about the latter. This two-factor approach to decision-making plays a key role in a paper I wrote with Ben Jarvis and Katharine Rubin a while back. It's part of an argument against pragmatic encroachment in epistemology.

Not too long ago, epistemology had a reputation for being esoteric and abstract, far-removed from practical questions. I always thought that was a mistake, for the reasons just mentioned. But I understand how some of the stereotypical projects in epistemology encouraged that mistake. But in the past five years or so, I think it's become more obvious to more people that epistemic questions play a pretty central role in the deep social questions that obviously impact everybody. These days, when non-philosophers ask about my work, and I tell them that I work in the part of philosophy that focuses on questions about what knowledge is and whether it is possible, and what makes some beliefs more reasonable to have than others, they usually say that it sounds very important and timely.

Describe the Arché Research Centre in St Andrews.

It was incredibly intellectually lively. We had speakers and visitors coming through pretty much constantly, and several weekly seminars corresponding to a few projects that were running: I was attached to the "Intuitions and Philosophical Methodology" project, but there were also projects on Basic Knowledge, Contextualism & Relativism, and the Foundations of Logical Consequence. Crispin Wright had a real talent for getting significant grants to fund large research projects — they covered my salary, and those of the other postdocs, and quite a few PhD students, and a lot of conferences and visitors. (Crispin left St Andrews during my time there.) There was a lot of interaction between the faculty, postdocs, and students in all the projects, and work and social life were all pretty well bound up together. In a lot of ways it felt like a pretty natural extension of my experience in grad school. I spent nearly all my time thinking and talking and writing about philosophy. I still made time to perform in a few operas and operettas.

St Andrews is beautiful, but it is a tiny town. There wasn't a lot to do there besides philosophy, and I'm not the kind of person who just wants to walk the same couple of streets and see the same people every day. Easy access to Europe helped some, but I was definitely happy to move to a city when the time came.

My Arché post was a four-year postdoc, focused almost entirely on research, with minimal teaching. It really was an incredible way to start a career. I spent my time developing dissertation ideas, writing new papers, talking to our constant parade of visitors, and writing my book with Ben. By the time I started thinking about applying for permanent jobs, I had a CV that was going to make me very competitive for them.

How did you meet Carrie?

I met Carrie during my time in St Andrews. She came to a conference that we organized, and a couple of subsequent workshops as well. She was living and working in Nottingham, but had had a previous connection to Arché, before my time there. We started dating, and pretty quickly became pretty serious. But that was a long-distance relationship, from opposite sides of the UK. It's not a huge nation, but the available train lines didn't make visits particularly convenient; it typically took 7–8 hours over several trains, for one of us to get to the other. So we started putting feelers out for possible pairs of philosophy jobs. We found one when Carrie was invited to apply for a Canada Research Chair at UBC; they offered her the job, and a postdoc for me. This was after my third year of my four-year contract in St Andrews — so it was a lateral move, but a chance for us to live together, and with an indication that UBC would consider making a more permanent offer down the line. We took the jobs and moved to Canada in 2011.

Carrie's offer was tenured, but I was still on a fixed-term postdoc, so we continued to be active in the job market when we arrived. We kept a lookout for places that had junior and senior (or open) openings at the same time. That first year, we saw two such pairs of jobs, and applied for both of them. Once it became clear that we were a real flight risk, UBC pretty quickly found a tenure-track line for me. I think at the time I had received one offer, and Carrie and I were shortlisted for all three other positions.

Finding a convenient two-body-problem solution in a beautiful city, motivated by UBC's interest in my partner, was yet another incredible stroke of unearned luck in my career.

Do you and Carrie talk about philosophy 24/7? Deepest philosophical disagreements?

We don’t, really. Sometimes when one of us is working on an idea we’ll talk through it with the other, but we don’t spend at all a large proportion of our time together in that mode. Our views and methodologies are generally pretty friendly to one another’s, but I guess it’s fair to say that I have more rationalist tendencies, and she has more empiricist ones. I think we have some methodological differences, too — I’m more attracted to grand attempts to systematize things than Carrie is; she often has more particularist or contextualist tendencies.

So you and Carrie are married and in an open relationship, right? Were your peers, friends, and family cool with it?

We are, yes. Carrie and I made a decision to be open about being open, and published a magazine article about our open marriage, only a few months after we got married in 2011. As many of your readers will know, Carrie would eventually go on to develop her work on love into a major research project that has gotten a fair bit of press attention. As one might expect, there was a range of kinds of responses. We did get some unfortunate misunderstandings and judgment from a couple of family members — in one case it was something we successfully worked through and came to a good understanding; in another, it was someone we weren't close to, and we just kept our distance after that. But for the most part, people have either been very positive or kept their feelings to themselves. We occasionally have twitter trolls try to weaponize it against us.

The culture has moved quite a bit on non-monogamy in the past decade. In 2011 there were very few people in our social circles who were entirely 'out' about being open, although we knew quite a few people who were open about it to varying degrees among friends. We were surprised how many people wrote to us — including a lot of philosophers — thanking us for our discussion, and disclosing that they were in open relationships but didn't feel safe being public about them. Now it's much less marginalized. I wouldn't say it's mainstream — there are still strong default monogamous assumptions in play nearly everywhere — but it's no longer surprising to hear someone mention their open relationship, especially if they are younger than me.

So far, it seems like your work was relatively formal and abstract, but nowadays, you seem like you are increasingly interested in interested in social and political applied philosophy, things like rape culture, consent, justice. When did this expansion of your interests occur, and why?

Yeah there's definitely been a shift from more traditional abstract philosophical work earlier in my career, to more feminist and political work more recently. This wasn't something planned or calculated; it's just been a case of my work following my interests more generally. I had very little exposure to serious critical social thought early in my life, as an undergrad, or as a grad student. So early in my career when I was working on the epistemology of the a priori or the semantics of 'knows' ascriptions, I thought of myself as just doing the kind of philosophy that I had been taught as normal philosophy. I was aware of the existence of feminist philosophy; I had nothing against it, and had seen a couple talks that I found interesting — I remember one by Rae Langton at Brown circa 2004 in particular that made an impression on me — but I guess I thought of feminist philosophy as kind of its own separate area, and didn't feel any particular motivation to work there myself.

This changed as my own political critical consciousness developed. I would put this around 2010–2015 or so, which was the end of my postdoc in St Andrews, and the beginning of my time at UBC. It happened pretty gradually, but a lot of things came together to change my perspective on the world, and my research focus followed. Honestly a lot of it was just a matter of paying more attention. I listened to my women colleagues about their experiences in academia, and followed some of the discussions on some of the philosophy blogs. I regularly read the Feminist Philosophers blog, and gradually started to join some of those discussions myself. Early on, I remember being pretty cautious about this, not wanting to step out of my place — I vetted some of my ideas first with some women feminist philosopher friends before posting. Carrie and Kathryn Pogin both played that role for me several times. After a bit of practice, I became more confident in my own place in those discussions, although I remain aware that my place in feminist discourse will always be different from women's.

The big activist turn for me, both in life generally and in my research, came with philosophy discussions of sexual harassment and assault by some high-profile male philosophers against students. Philosophy got sort of a head start on the #metoo movement, with discussions of cases like Colin McGinn, Peter Ludlow, and John Searle. I was dismayed by some of the abysmal ways the students who complained in those cases were treated. This was for moral and political reasons, but also epistemic ones: people were not making judgments in accordance with the available evidence. So I sort of shifted into a research project on rape culture and the epistemology of testimony, and then started noticing connections between those issues and my previous work on knowledge and epistemic contextualism. From there I started thinking about sexual ethics itself as an interesting research topic.

The change has all been quite gradual, in my own mind — and there are clear lines of thought connecting my more political work to my more abstract ideas. I don't think of myself as having given up one for the other; it's just been a change in emphasis. One of the exciting things about philosophy is that it is relatively easy to shift research areas. I know I'll never run out of things to think about!

You’re at UBC now. How are the students different and similar from other students you’ve taught?

I've had the privilege of teaching at Brown and St Andrews, but the UBC students are the best students I've ever had. They're just as clever as the students I've worked with before, and far more conscientious. I was surprised and confused when I first arrived to see that the students were actually doing the readings I'd assigned. Before class!

Holy smokes! How has your teaching style changed?

I don't think my teaching style has changed dramatically over the years, but I think I've probably mellowed out a bit. I try to remember that my students are people with complicated lives of their own, and to be appropriately flexible and humane in my engagement with them. I've also moved over the years pretty firmly away from requiring students to buy textbooks — many of them already have more than enough demands on their bank accounts. The UBC library is pretty good about making licensed material available for my students electronically for free. I also developed an open-access logic textbook that I use every year. By my back-of-the-envelope calculations, I'd guess my former students over the years have kept somewhere in the ballpark of $100,000 in their pockets, that they would otherwise have spent on logic textbooks. I'm proud of that.

Awesome. Low points at UBC?

I don't think I'd care to get into it in detail here, but the business with the Philosophical Gourmet, and Brian Leiter threatening to sue me and Carrie, was pretty unpleasant. That was a low point for sure.

Proudest academic accomplishments? That is, if you could pick a couple papers as writing sample right now, what would they be and why?

I'm always most excited about my more recent stuff. I think my "Contextual Injustice" both gets at an important phenomenon, and is pretty representative of the way that I bring traditional philosophical work to bear on contemporary social issues. Likewise for my "Presupposition and Consent," which is also a source of pride along a different dimension — its publication in Feminist Philosophy Quarterly is a kind of accreditation of my feminist scholarship, which I developed relatively recently in my career. Similarly, "Not What I Agreed To," which I co-authored with my student Emily Tilton, was recently accepted into Ethics, which helps me feel like my work in ethics represents a genuine research program.

What drives you, philosophically?

I don't think I know. I like feeling like I'm contributing to questions that matter, and that people care about.

What's your writing routine like, nowadays?

It varies a lot, depending on my schedule, my other commitments, and my mental health, but at present, I'm trying to maintain a habit of writing at least a little bit every day, even if it's just half an hour. That's not enough time to really get the projects going, but it's enough to make them at least feel like they're simmering along in the background, ready to push forward with more serious work when the time is right for it. Like a lot of people, I am pretty motivated by deadlines, including my own internally set ones. When I was finishing my last book, I set a date I wanted to finish drafting, and a length I expected the book to be, and calculated every day how much writing on average I needed to do each day, and gave myself a daily word count. I think it ranged from 500 to 1000 words per day during that exercise. Drafting is always the hardest part for me to be motivated for; editing work I've already produced feels, for whatever reason, more rewarding and fun. So giving myself a permission slip to produce inelegant and wordy drafts on my first time through has helped me a lot. Lately I've been coauthoring a lot, with a variety of people. Each coauthoring relationship is different, but the peer accountability also helps me be more timely and productive.

Any interesting projects on the horizon?

I have several things on the go at the moment: a paper with Jen Foster on stereotypes and words and concepts and thought; a paper with Audrey Yap on defensiveness and anti-oppressive identity; a paper with Melissa Rees on consent; and papers of my own on dreaming and memory, knowledge norms, and social epistemology and contextualism. And I'm starting to get going on my next book, which will be on epistemic courage and positive epistemic norms — i.e., obligations to believe under certain circumstances. Those papers are in a variety of states of completion; I'm laying the groundwork for the book, which I hope to make a lot of progress on during a sabbatical next year.

Best philosopher or philosophers you disagree with most?

I guess the simple answer for me is Descartes and Hume — philosophers who set out great skeptical projects, and gave what I think of as conservative responses to them. Descartes tried to recreate orthodoxy from self-evident principle; Hume gave up on trying to provide fundamental reasons, and suggested just going with custom and habit. I don't think it's an accident that skeptical projects of this kind end up coming around to reinforce the status quo.

What are you listening to nowadays? Reading? Watching?

Outside of philosophy, my media consumption is pretty mainstream and middlebrow. I'm watching the new Star Trek shows, and Marvel shows and movies. I don't ask for a lot out of them, but they mostly entertain me. Lately I'm reading Terry Pratchett to relax. I almost never listen to music, but I do still love opera. I don't spend a lot of time on these activities — maybe a few hours a week. My big hobby is running. I'm currently training for my fifth marathon; that takes up a lot of time.

Last meal?

I'm terribly indecisive about these things. I'd want to examine every option, and ideally taste it, before settling on one. I always expect that Carrie finds me pretty tiresome at a food court, but she assures me she’s just bemused. She is very patient with me! With a suitably patient executioner maybe I could spin my last meal into a kind of Arabian Nights situation and stay alive a while. Maybe I'd set up a food blog.

You can ask an omniscient being a question and get an honest answer, what's the question?

I feel like this is a boring answer, but I don't think it'd be a distinctively philosophical question — getting "the answer" from an omniscient being doesn't sound very satisfying to me. The best idea I have right now is to leverage the opportunity into financial gain — getting the winning numbers for a huge upcoming lottery jackpot prize seems like the most obvious way. I'm not at all sure what I'd do with a billion dollars, but that's enough money to have a real influence on the world.

Great answer. Thanks Jonathan!

[interviewer: Cliff Sosis]