Amia Srinivasan: belief

Transcript context

…Maybe when I was eight, I thought I could have been a fireman, but I couldn’t have actually been a fireman. Your view, as an undergrad, that you might have been a lawyer — is it like me thinking about being a fireman, or is there a coherent version of you that’s now a lawyer? I think there’s a very coherent, though less happy, version of me that’s a lawyer, in part just because it’s such a common trajectory for American undergraduate students who especially major in philosophy, which I did. You go to law school if you don’t really know what else you were going to do, and I very nearly did that. That was my plan, and then what happened was, I won a scholarship to Oxford, and so ended up doing graduate school in philosophy. That’s basically what stopped me from going to law school. It’s not totally clear to me what I would have done with a law degree. It’s more likely that I would have ended up a legal academic, I think, than an actual practicing lawyer, given my dispositions. Is Marquis de Sade strong as a philosopher or just a writer?…

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