Elijah Millgram: evaluation

Transcript context

…What’s your best Robert Nozick story? [laughs] I’ll give you two of them. Well, I’ll only give you the two that I’ve heard directly. There’s a story that’s hearsay, but maybe I shouldn’t. I TA’ed for him once, and I discovered how he taught. He would assign huge piles of material that he wanted to read, but he wouldn’t write a lecture. He would just read the reading assignment all week in parallel with the class. He would turn up five or ten minutes early before class and lock himself in his office. He refused to be disturbed in those five minutes. And then he would get up in front of the class and he would open his mouth — and a lecture would come out. I can’t imagine being able to teach that way. When I lecture, I spend most of my week preparing for my lectures. I can’t imagine just having it happen like that. Here’s another: This I think is philosophically interesting. At one point I realized that when you discussed something with Nozick, he instantly saw arguments — a sheaf, a panoply of arguments for and against and counterarguments — that would just appear to him all at once. This came up in a conversation in his office when — maybe we have a little bit too much in common that way. I was an advisee and he said, “Well, what about this point?” I said, “Give me a minute and I’ll think of an argument,” and he looked at me and he said, “That’s the problem.” That I will think of an argument. The way a lot of philosophers make up their minds about things is they consider some question and then they find an argument, and if the argument seems like it gets them a conclusion, that’s enough for them: they stop, because they can’t think of any more arguments. If you could only think of one argument, this is a good way of — anyway, like Peirce would say, of settling on something. That wouldn’t work for Nozick because he could — arguments just sprang to his mind, more and more of them, instantly. He ended up thinking of arguments as — the idea that you could force somebody to believe something by giving them an argument, that’s just taking advantage of somebody’s disability: that they could only think of one argument, they can’t think of more. That’s why he titled his book (I guess it’s his second book) Philosophical Explanations. His line was, “OK, I know better than this. I’m not going to try to twist your arm with arguments. I’m going to give you explanations for things and you can buy them or not, but hopefully they’ll be illuminating.” That’s a very interesting place for somebody to be in. You have to be as smart as him to be in the place that he was. Was Karl Popper a great philosopher, even a good philosopher? And why do his followers in practice so often seem to be dogmatic?…

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