In this interview, Stephen Yablo talks about his parents, a psychologist and an engineer, his bar mitzvah, ping pong, Spiderman, Atlantis, impossibility, drugs, breaking and entering, correspondence courses, working with the mentally disabled, attending university of Toronto, philosophy of dance, Protagoras, Bas van Fraassen, Joni Mitchell, taking classes with John Slater, van Fraasen, and Hans Herzberger, philosophy post-Wittgenstein, moving to India, joining the program in Logic and Methodology at UC Berkeley, working with Davidson, Myro, and Grice, getting 38 (!) job interviews, embarrassing himself in front of Sellars, landing a gig at Michigan, moving to MIT, the difference between philosophical progress and understanding, The Minority Body, Nintendo Wii, the leveraged freedom chair, The Verificationist, Synecdoche, Lupin, and his last meal…
[4/15/2021]
So, where did you grow up?
Toronto, Canada. Way out in the suburbs, towards York University if you know it, which was being constructed when I was growing up.
What was your family like?
My mother Gloria was a clinical psychologist. She worked with "emotionally disturbed" (that was the term then, no idea what it is now) children. My father, Saul, was an engineer working for Phillips Electronics. He'd come from Poland in the 1930s at age about 10. My mom was born in Toronto to Romanian parents. They met in college, at the University of Toronto. I was the second child after my brother Paul, who is three years older. Paul too is a psychologist.
Religious household?
Yes we were Conservative Jews. Hebrew School three times a week, Saturday services, B'nai B'rith summer camp, kosher, the whole deal. I stuck with it through my bar mitzvah but not much longer.
Why not? Religious now?
As a little kid, what were you interested in?
Ping pong as much as anything. We had a table in the basement. "Handball" played with a tennis ball against the side of the school. I liked to read the newspaper, the Toronto Star, for some reason, right down to the classifieds. Maybe because my father spent huge amounts of time on it. I was very into spelling and comic books. I noodled around on the guitar. I ran relay and cross country for a few years, not well. I was given a year of "independent studies" in grade 8 (how is that even possible?) and spent it on random unsupervised reading and listening to blues in the school library.
What blues album was your favorite, back then?
Johnny Winter’s first album, called “Johnny Winter.” Also “Muddy Waters, Folk Singer.”
What comic books were you reading?
Archie, Little Dot, Richie Rich, Daredevil, Superman, Flash, Spiderman, Batman, and Mandrake the Magician come to mind.
Are you into the comic book movies and TV stuff?
Now? No. Do watch a lot of TV though!
How were you similar to, and different from, the rest of your family?
I was geeky, solitary, and insolent, not unlike my father in those respects. My brother would get obsessed with certain things --- dolphins, National Geographic, certain kinds of music --- and I picked up the habit from him. Three obsessions were jokes, Atlantis, and impossibility.
What was your Atlantis theory?
I don't guess I had an Atlantis theory as such. I remember being shocked to hear the story came from Plato.
What do you mean when you say you were into impossibility?
I was puzzled about how anything could be truly impossible, as opposed to unlikely or difficult to arrange.
As a teenager, did you get into any trouble?
I guess, though not "real" trouble. I stole and broke into cars with friends. I was stoned through much of high school. I would be sent to the office a lot. A letter of protest I wrote (erudite, with quotes!) after being bawled out by the Vice Principal for Lateness and Discipline led them to ask me not to return. This was followed by two years of "free school" and correspondence courses.
What did your parents make of your shenanigans?
They didn't like the drugs and mischief, but I guess decided to wait me out since my grades were OK. My mother was all about creativity and self-expression and saw my philosophy dabbling through that lens. She would come home from conferences (she was a clinical psychologist) with quotes she'd scribbled down about the self, the mind/body problem, freedom and so on. My father found philosophical ideas laughable but not for lack of understanding. He would repeat them back very accurately, in disbelieving tones as though the ridiculousness was self-evident and someone must be playing a trick on me.
Ha! Favorite subjects in high school?
English, history, and math.
What was on your mind in general? What were you passionate about, if anything?
Not sure, really. Poverty and the population explosion bothered me a lot. I volunteered with Planned Parenthood. I worked at Shadow Lake Camp which was run by what was then called MTAMR, the Metropolitan Toronto Association for the Mentally Retarded. Working with the mentally disabled seemed like a possible future at some point. I am super proud of writing the camp song, which they still use: it opens with the hard to forget line, “Seems like summer comes around ‘bout this time every year.’’
Leonard Cohen seemed pretty cool.
Any sign you'd grow up to be a philosopher?
Yes and no. No, in that I didn't know until college that there was a field called philosophy. Yes, in that I'd encountered philosophical writing over the years and adored it. My great uncle Joseph Chaikoff, the family's one professed communist and also our family doctor, had given me for unknown reasons a small green volume on Nietzsche. There were books by a Canadian author, George Grant, on the shelf at home, I guess from my parents' college days. Grant wrote about the idea of a nation or the like. (Don't laugh, or do, but I tried to follow his lead with a one-page piece "The Individual and Mass Society.") I'd heard from my mom and dad about Emil Fackenheim, teaching Hegel and the Talmud downtown at U of Toronto. Ricky Levine showed me Obiter Scripta by Santayana at Jewish summer camp. Polish Logic, edited by Storrs McCall, was remaindered at the local library and I bought it for ten cents. Why that book in particular? I still can't quite figure it out.
Did you start thinking about what you wanted to do in college, if college was even on the table? Where did you apply? What was the plan?
I definitely planned on going to college. Some of our free school courses were taught on a volunteer basis by professors. And we would drop in on college courses just for the experience. I remember taking the bus downtown to listen to Anatol Rapoport, the mathematical psychologist, or Marshall McLuhan, the ``hot vs cool medium'' guy. I applied only to U of T. It cost $300 a term at the time. The plan was to study English or Psychology.
If the guy you were when you graduated high school met the guy you are now, what would surprise him?
I must be the most unreflective person alive but I don't know the answer to this.
Was college what you expected?
Pretty much. I'd already sat in on some courses as mentioned.
When and why did you decide to major in philosophy?
Second year, after playing around with math, physics, and something then called mathematical psychology. I guess in the end it was a double major with math. I don't specifically remember why except that people I'd been uncomprehendingly reading anyway all turned out to have been philosophers. Toronto had a huge department, 85 faculty or so, and there were unbelievably many courses to choose between. Plus you could take as many as you wanted more or less, since there were hardly any distribution requirements. I might be making this up but I believe 30 of my forty undergraduate courses were in philosophy.
What was your intro class like?
I don't know if there was one. The first class I remember was Ancient Philosophy with Frances Sparshott, who revealed at some point that his passion was philosophy of dance. For our final paper he had us invent a pre-Socratic philosopher who ought to have existed but strangely didn't. What a great assignment. I made up some kind of conventionalist/relativistic figure who probably in retrospect was not all that far from Protagoras. Although maybe not, in further retrospect, since Sparshott called my guy "anachronistic," a word I had to look up.
Inspiring undergrad teachers or classes?
John G. Slater taught an undergraduate course entirely about Bertrand Russell. He had a huge collection of Russell books in his office, which was set up like library stacks. They were in all sorts of languages. I seem to remember that one of my "jobs" in India was to find Tamil or Telugu versions of Problems of Philosophy. Slater was connected to the Russell Archives at McMaster. Who would have guessed Russell’s papers would wind up in the steel town of Hamilton, Ontario, not far from Toronto? Reminds me of a Susan Sontag piece in The New Yorker about making plans in high school to do a pilgrimage to Old Europe in search of her literary hero Thomas Mann----until she discovered he was living at the time on Amalfi Drive in Pacific Palisades. Slater had us reading everything from Principles of Mathematics to more popular stuff like Marriage and Morals. Russell said when he won the Nobel Prize in Literature that it was for Marriage and Morals, but this was apparently not true; according to Wikipedia the Prize was awarded not for any particular book but "his varied and significant writings in which he champions humanitarian ideals and freedom of thought"
Another inspiring class was with Bas van Fraassen: Formal Semantics. He explained Kaplan's then new ideas about the semantics of indexicals. He told us about intuitionism, models, presupposition, truth, proof, and paradox. I tried to make up my own paradox in that course, which I remember well enough not to want to repeat it for you here. I was an insufferable prick and he let me down very gently. He took enormous care with his paper comments, right down to the grammar. It was from van Fraassen I learned that there is no apostrophe in possessive "its." I don't know how he managed to communicate this without causing embarrassment, but that was van Fraassen; he had a gift for that sort of thing. I remember students commenting after class that he knew everything about everything but wore his learning lightly. There was also a grad course on Belief and the Will. I hardly understood a word, but can tell you there was a lot on St Augustine, Descartes, and doxastic voluntarism. His technical and humane letters sides were always both in play which impressed me to no end.
I learned the most from Hans Herzberger, especially his seminar, The Inexpressible, which somehow wove Tarski and the inexpressibility of truth and Frege on the concept horse together with St John of the Cross, St Teresa of Avila, Stace’s Mysticism and Philosophy, the Tractatus, the silence of the Buddha, and a lot else. I remember Bimal K Matilal coming from Oxford to lecture on Indian Logic. Saul Kripke’s “Outline of a Theory of Truth” had appeared in 1975 (this was 1978 or so) and we spent a long while on that as well.
Other influences?
Peter Hess, James Graff, Danny Goldstick, Ronnie de Sousa, Stephen Cook (in computer science), and Alasdair Urquhart.
Theories of truth are extraordinarily abstract. For you, what was the appeal?
I guess I’ve just always liked paradoxes, and truth paradoxes like the Liar are among the best and most perplexing. I am taken too by the Kantian idea that contradictions arise not from “mistakes,” but overzealous application of the very principles that make rational thought possible in the first place. Paradoxes have a tragicomic aspect that can be highly addictive and seems to go very deep. '
So, what did you do for fun in college?
I was introverted and spent a lot of my first three years studying. Eventually I moved downtown into a housing coop and fell in love with cooperative living. There was a food coop too that I threw myself into, involving weekly 5am trips to an enormous farmer's market (the St Lawrence Market) to buy industrial quantities of cheese and cabbage for all my hippy dippy confreres on Sussex Ave. It was a commune-ist, Joni Mitchell, bread and roses vibe and I miss it very much. I was thoroughly freaked out by Watergate and the idea of corruption in high places.
Were you still engaged in mischief?
No.
Were you friends with the other majors?
Some.
Sex?
A bit.
Drugs?
Yes.
Music?
Played a lot of folk guitar. No one is more amenable to bad guitar playing than coop-ers.
Politically active?
Not especially active, but always instinctively a champion of the downtrodden in that effortless Canadian way.
Overall, how did your worldview evolve?
I got interested in poverty, social justice, and the "larger world." I had no money and wanted to travel. John Slater told me about a Commonwealth scholarship I could apply for that would pay my way to India. It was officially to get an MA in Philosophy at the University of Pune (near Bombay) though that never actually happened. I took classes to keep up appearances but spent more and more time train-hopping around the country. I did live in Pune for the most part, initially with the mother of then Toronto grad student Neera Badhwar. Neera later became a philosophy professor at Oklahoma.
When exactly did you decide to go to grad school for philosophy, and why?
I decided in Pune but was travelling when the time came. I applied from Kathmandu to the Program in Logic and Methodology of Science at UC Berkeley --- founded I think by Tarski in the 1950s. This was probably on the recommendation of Hans Herzberger. Hans was living that year in Andhra Pradesh in south India, where his wife Radhi taught at a Krishnamurti school, the Rishi Valley School. He is there now, too! They very kindly allowed me to stay with them for six weeks. I was rewarded with a ringside seat as Hans was developing his own formal theory of truth, a competitor to Kripke’s, the revision theory. I wrote my first eventually-published paper there under Hans's guidance, on an alternative, top-down formulation of Kripke's theory of truth.
Why Berkeley?
The Berkeley logic program made sense because I was keen on formal theories of truth. Also the aforementioned hippy orientation fit well with Berkeley. I don't think I applied anywhere else, anyway I didn't get in anywhere else.
What was your writing sample on?
My writing sample if I'm not mistaken was on a problem for functionalism about the mental, that it couldn't explain the "manifest" character of felt pain. It was written for Ronnie de Sousa in his Phil Mind course.
Memorable extracurricular moments from your time in India?
A brief encounter with Krishnamurti in Madras, now Chennai. Hanging out now and then with “ Rajneeshees,” Disciples of Bhagwan Shri Rajneesh. He had his ashram in Pune then. But it ran into various kinds of trouble (there was an assassination attempt) and he left for Oregon in 1980 to start the commune Rajneeshpuram. The 2018 Netflix documentary “Wild, Wild Country” gives a great account of those years.
Surprises in grad school?
I was lonely.
Philosophically, what was trending there at the time? In general?
Davidson came in 1982. T-biconditionals were definitely trending. Searle’s program in Intentionality was big. Wittgenstein, skepticism, “skills and practices,” philosophy as an activity more than a truth-seeking enterprise. Feminist theory. Moore, Thompson Clarke, and Stroud on knowledge. An emphasis on appreciating the human predicament and some amount of disdain for analytic problem-solving. David Lewis gave “Causal Explanation” and people were puzzled that he was trying to make “progress” on the issue. On the other hand Kripke gave “Nozick on Knowledge” which was well-received. A number of grad students, including sometimes me, were trying to figure out what was still worth doing after Wittgenstein, and mostly coming up empty. The faculty was thought to have a view on this which they for some reason wouldn’t tell us.
Explain why a philosopher might not know what to do, post-Wittgenstein, for those unfamiliar with his views. What do you think the answer to that question is?
Quine has a distinction in Word and Object between "clarity" and "fluency." If Wittgenstein is right, then fluency is ultimately all we can hope for. Luckily for the philosopher, part of fluency is taking steps to stamp out unclarity where it is positively getting in the way. (Compare Austin on special reasons for doubt; part of knowing is taking an interest in motivated, confidence-sapping doubts.) There's no room left on this view for pursuing clarity in an absolute, context-free way. But even if that kind of philosophy is over, there is still the scratching-where-it-itches kind. Luckily too for the philosopher, the line between these two approaches is contested, maybe even "essentially contestable" (WB Gallie's term).
What were the strengths of your grad program?
Language (Grice, Davidson, Searle, Adams), mind (Davidson, Searle, Dreyfus), epistemology (Stroud, Adams, Davidson), history (Broughton, Stroud), logic and philosophy of mathematics (Craig, Chihara, Mates, Adams—on the math side, Henkin, Vaught, Harrington), and metaphysics (Myro, Chihara, Grice, Davidson, Code) come to mind. I’m sure that I am leaving a lot out! Bernard Williams was there for a period and Richard Wollheim too.
Inspirational teachers or classes? Who did you talk with most about philosophy?
George Myro, Paul Grice, and Donald Davidson, on the philosophy faculty. Jack Silver and Robert Solovay in math. Too many grad students to name, among them Vann McGee and Sally Haslanger, both now colleagues at MIT.
What was Grice like?
Funny, kind, fragile, eccentric.
What did you do in your spare time and for fun? Love?
Squash, biking, concerts, drugs, climbing around stoned in the Berkeley hills. I played guitar, there were sing alongs. I was involved with Amnesty International for a while. What love there was tended to be with non-philosophers. Sally and I got together only later, when she was a junior professor at Princeton.
What was your dissertation on? Who was your dissertation adviser? What was that process like?
The metaphysics of objects and events. (It was called “Things.”) There is no fact of the matter, it argued, as between essentialism and antiessentialism. Each could mimic the other’s successes and each faced analogues of the other’s problems. The secret sauce was a plenitudinarian version of modal many-thingism. There was a theory of causation in there somewhere too. My advisors were Myro and Davidson. Myro was beyond generous with his time and ideas. I remember him wanting to reschedule an appointment because something had come up two hours later and he thought we might need three hours. Davidson was strongly antiessentialist and referred me to the Carnap-Quine debate on quantified modal logic. He asked me once who believed essentialism any more. Kripke was for him the exception that proved the rule, so I mentioned Wiggins. Stop right there, he said, David Wiggins is my friend! (I have told this story too many times, apologies to everyone tired of it.) I was highly opinionated in my no-fact-of-the-matter-ism and was not too good about taking advice.
Were you expected to publish in grad school?
Not especially, but I did. “Grounding, Dependence, and Paradox,” written mostly in India with Herzberger, came out in 1982, and “Truth and Reflection” in 1985 (both Journal of Philosophical Logic).
Teach?
Yes, but none of it comes back to me at the moment, except subbing for Davidson when he was travelling. I gave my own slightly subversive interpretation of his approach which he told the class on his return was completely wrong. He gave me $75 (then quite a lot) and told me teaching was to be my job and I should get used to being paid for it.
How did grad school hone your skills as a philosopher? How'd your views change?
Not sure really.
Perfectly acceptable answer! What was the job market like when you finished? Good experience?
It was a different era. I had 38 or so interviews in what was felt to be a bad year.
What the what.
This was a decent showing, but not in those days over the top. Most of them I bombed. I wound up with two offers.
Horror stories?
They asked at Pitt what my thesis was about. I said, it’s about whether de re modality was “in the world.” Sellars who I hadn’t realized was still alive was apoplectic. “Do you realize what you are playing at, young man? Is negation in the world? Is predication? Is generality?” That night I was recounting this to somebody at the bar, when a figure at the next table turned to impale me on an awful, withering glare. You can guess who it was.
I can! So, where did you land your first gig?
Michigan, chosen at the last minute over USC when it was explained by Kim (what I truly had not realized) that Michigan was just a whole lot better. People often remark how clueless aspiring grad students used to be in the old days, but the same was true oftentimes of graduating students looking for their first job.
Was Michigan what you expected?
I don't remember having any definite expectations. I was worried, I think, about gender issues. There were no women on the regular faculty at all. Adrian Piper and Sarah Conly had just left. Elizabeth Anderson arrived in my second year. Sally Haslanger who didn't arrive until later was I think the first tenured-from-within woman in the department ever. That didn't come easy either; it was based on a tenured offer she'd received from Cornell.
Who’d you hang out with?
I hung out in the early years with, among others, Paul Boghossian, Allan Gibbard, Bill Taschek, Jaegwon Kim, Ken Walton, Steve Darwall, Crispin Wright, Peter Railton, Kit Fine, David Velleman, Liz Anderson, and James Conant when he visited the Michigan Society of Fellows.
Boghossian! Kim! Railton! In general, did you find these folks intimidating?
At first, who wouldn't? The time comes when you're friends more than co-philosophers.
What was Kim like? Seemed like a lovely human being.
He was. Super-generous and constructive. Kim had a literary side people don’t tend to know about. (He studied French literature in Korea and continued with it a bit after transferring to Dartmouth.) He showed a lot of patience with my views on mental causation, which was not easy I suspect given how little he liked them.
Do you feel like the grad students were well served at Michigan?
Many or most PhD students did value theory, which meant in many cases positioning themselves with respect to the big three (Gibbard, Darwall, Railton....previously Stevenson, Frankena, Brandt). Some said this stifled creativity, not that I was in any position to tell at that point.
Academically, philosophically, what were the most important things you think you did while you were at Michigan?
The papers that come to mind are "Mental Causation," "Identity Essence and Indiscernibility" (really that was written the month before I got there), "Is Conceivability a Guide to Possibility?" "Paradox without Self-Reference," and "Definitions, Consistent and Inconsistent."
What makes something important, philosophically?
First-order philosophy is hard enough; where philosophical importance comes from I couldn't tell you.... and probably wouldn't want to know.
How'd you evolve as a teacher?
Started out spending 10 hours preparing for each hour in the classroom. Stopped doing that.
Any major world events--political, technological, cultural changes, trends, etc.--that had a significant impact on your life and worldview after grad school?
Political trends, so to speak, were so outrageously awful that I could barely think straight some days. I remember there was a book Friendly Fascism we were reading back in the Reagan years. Now I almost miss the friendly version, in comparison to what we have now. It feels like the country's moral character has been going to hell at least since Reagan, there's just less room now to pretend otherwise.
How did you and Sally become a thing?
I asked her if I could borrow a pencil in John Searle's Intentionality seminar in 1981. We were friends through grad school. She and the rest of our cabal (Randal Parker, Kayley Vernallis, Paul Kube) did a road trip in 1987 or so, going through Princeton where Sally'd just started to Michigan where I'd just started. A year or two later I stayed with her while in Princeton for a Kripke seminar. We became a proto-thing then and a real thing later.
So, why'd y’all ditch Michigan?
Always loved Cambridge. The department was and is wonderful. Michigan hadn't treated Sally so well. Our newly adopted children were African American and we wanted to live somewhere more complicated.
Describe Cambridge for a person who has never been.
No, you describe it for a person who has never been.
Ha! So, by the time you had left Michigan for MIT, how had your attitude toward academia or philosophy changed?
I became less focused on philosophical progress and more on philosophical understanding, even at the risk of confusing myself (and others).
What's the difference between progress and understanding, in philosophy?
To gain understanding is a kind of progress. I guess the question is whether it's the main or only kind. I'd say no, but it looms larger for me than for those who think we are racking up big wins in philosophical knowledge.
You were chair at MIT for a bit? Stressful? Advice for chairs?
One day it’s over and then you forget.
What is philosophy? What makes it different from things like science and religion?
I don't know, though come to think of it, I have been working on and off on a paper, "The Demarcation Problem for Philosophy," about this. Philosophy doesn't have a distinctive subject matter the way physics or geography do; the world has physical aspects but no philosophical aspects. This doesn't necessarily mean that subject matter has nothing to offer demarcation-wise. A lot of philosophy is brought on by mismatches between what we mean(t) to be talking about and what is out there to settle the truth-values of our sentences.
Love it! Favorite works of philosophy published in the last 10 years?
Hmmm, I'll take that to mean books.....not necessarily ones I've read, but that interest me and seem good. Matti Eklund, Choosing Normative Concepts. Elizabeth Barnes, The Minority Body. Marc Lange, Because Without Cause. Sally Haslanger, Resisting Reality. Mark Wilson, Physics Avoidance. Sandel, The Tyranny of Merit. Francesco Berto and Matteo Plebani, Ontology and Metaontology. Liz Anderson, Private Government.
When did you discover that you had MS?
I got the diagnosis in 2005. It wasn’t bad at first, but then around 2010 it kind of took over. I was in a mobility scooter already when doing the Locke lectures in 2012.
If you could go back in time, when you were first diagnosed, and give yourself any advice, what would it be?
I have always been nervous about accepting help from people...don't know why but it is not an uncommon attitude in my neck of the gender woods. This continued after my diagnosis, though it made less and less sense. Help was what I needed - a hand to lean on for balance, someone to fill out forms or write on the board for me, and even in recent years help with getting my shirt on or out of my chair. MS wound up being in one way a blessing in that it wouldn't put up with this characterological defect. But it took a while. I suppose my advice if I could go back now would be to stop being such a baby about being sometimes baby-like in the amount I need from people. One person that comes to mind here is my friend and colleague Agustín Rayo who took me with him to Peru, so I could see Machu Picchu while my legs still kind of worked. Agustín also "spotted" me in seminar, with the idea of stepping in if I lost the plot, which has been known to happen. Alex Byrne and David Balcarras took over my teaching when I had a seizure with a month left in term. Elizabeth Barnes wrote me the sweetest possible message when I stumbled over myself at a conference in Hamburg. Katharina Felka, Naomi Osorio-Kupferblum, and Matteo Plebani kept the aboutness fires burning when I began to slow down. I can't really tell you all the people that have propped me up since diagnosis, but there are a LOT and I am beyond grateful. Sally is Sally, which if you know her is all the explanation you need, and good luck to you if you don't.
What are you working on nowadays?
Nonexistence, conditionals, permission, hyperintensionality, modal plenitude and modal sorites paradoxes.
Interesting! What drives you?
Dunno.
Really? No idea?
Really. Doing a thing is hard enough, surely. Knowing how and why you do it is optional and can often get in the way --- witness the methodologically self-conscious moments (pragmatism. verificationism, etc.) in the history of our own field.
Hey, those are my favorite moments! If you had a living, breathing, philosophical arch enemy--the best philosopher you disagree with most--who would it be?
Can't think of anyone.
Couple years ago, Sally got a package of excrement in the mail. Why? Who? Thoughts?
Oh, some guy off his rocker I seem to remember. No thoughts beyond that.
How do you see the future of philosophy?
It lies ahead, as Calvin Coolidge said of the future in toto.
What do you do in your spare time nowadays?
Spelling Bee in the NY Times. Othello on my phone. Muck around on the guitar, trying to keep up with Sally who got a ukulele for Christmas. Hang out with Zina and Isaac, my children. I've been trying to get an old Nintendo Wii going so I can play Tennis and Ping Pong for fun and balance. Have been known to take long wheelchair rides with my Leveraged Freedom Chair, invented at MIT.
Do you and Sally talk about philosophy constantly or?
No, in spurts.
Do kids change the way you approach philosophy?
Nah.
In general, how does philosophy inform your life outside of academia?
Not much at all.
Does that concern you?
Sounds like it may concern you!
I’m not sure, to be perfectly honest! Read any good fiction lately?
The Verificationist by Donald Antrim.
Movies?
It's old but we just saw Synecdoche, New York.
That is a great movie. Love Charlie Kaufman! Television?
We watch TV every night. I adore TV. Next up is Lupin on Netflix.
It’s the best! Last meal?
This can mean more than one thing. But the answer on either interpretation is Thai coconut curry.
If you could ask an omniscient being one question and get an honest, comprehensible answer, what would it be?
What is to be done?
[interviewer: Cliff Sosis]