Kwame Anthony Appiah: belief

Transcript context

…Last question. Let’s say a very smart 19-year-old comes to you, maybe at NYU, and they say, “I want to be the next generation’s version of you in some way, but of course, different.” What advice do you give them, ethical or otherwise? I think what I say is, life is not the kind of thing you can plan. You can’t have a sort of life plan — which is a term some ethicists use — in your back pocket. I was a medical student when I went to university. I was going to be a doctor till I was 20. Then I realized that I really loved philosophy, but I didn’t become a philosophy undergraduate because I thought I was going to be a philosophy graduate student. I became a philosophy undergraduate because I wanted to do more philosophy, and then I was going to go home and figure out what to do with the rest of my life. I went home, spent a year in Ghana, and the job I got was teaching philosophy at the University of Ghana. That made me realize that I liked the teaching, which I hadn’t done before, obviously, as an undergraduate. I didn’t set out to make any kind of impact. I just was interested in the subject and wanted to do more. Wanted to write more, wanted to think more, wanted to teach more. I think that too much reflection on the effects of your work, as opposed to just on the work itself, is probably not a good idea. You should just do it and hope that it will have uptake. And the final thing I’ll say is that there are many, many kinds of uptake. There are people whose uptake is almost entirely within professional philosophy, who are doing wonderful, important work, which will never be explained probably to people outside because there are things you need to know — modal logic, or tensile calculus, or something if you’re a philosopher of physics, that aren’t ever going to be explained to everybody. That work is very important, too. That sort of work — the work that isn’t easily explained to the rest of the world — is in the background of the work that does get explained more widely. I feel very much, as it were, standing on the shoulders of . . . perhaps not giants, but anyway, pretty large people, who are not visible outside the subject, but without whose work . . . In other words, the work is the product of the community of scholars, and you’re just one tiny proboscis on that vast amoeba of philosophy. And there’s stuff right in the middle, the nucleus, and in there, people are doing things that nobody’s ever going to figure out outside the amoeba itself. So don’t look for any particular kind of impact. Do the best work you can, and if it’s good work, it will have some kind of impact. Maybe not in the world outside philosophy, but in philosophy. Also, hold on to the thing that should have brought you in in the first place, which is your own desire to understand things. Always, in the end, what I’m doing, even when I’m answering those questions, is figuring out what I think, which is the only way I know how to make a contribution, just to figure out the best answer you can come up with, in the available time, to the question that presents itself to you. out what I think, which is the only way I know how to make a contribution, just to figure out the best answer you can come up with, in the available time, to the question that presents itself to you. The questions in philosophy that present themselves to me seem very urgent to me, even if some of them have answers that are for the ages. And I’m mostly working on them because I want to know the answer myself.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.