Bryan Caplan: evaluation

Transcript context

…Michael Huemer. Who is he? And why is he important, especially for you, but not only? Michael Huemer is a professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado at Boulder. I actually met him my freshman year at Berkeley when we were both undergraduates in Paul Feyerabend’s Ancient Philosophy class, which, by the way, is the only class so bad I ever just stopped attending. [laughter] Because he just didn’t talk about ancient philosophy. He only wanted to talk about action at a distance, and how that is possible. Anyway, I met Michael Huemer there, and out of all philosophers, he came to have the biggest influence on me. There were many issues that I was grappling with, a lot of it under the influence of Ayn Rand, where the more I learned in philosophy, the more dissatisfied I became, and yet I couldn’t think of anything else that made any sense. Mike Huemer, as a student, wrote a bunch of essays that said, “Wow, this seems like it really actually solves a fundamental problem of philosophy in a way that’s so much more satisfying than any of the others.” He was a big influence to me there, and then over time, he really built on this. He now has this amazing corpus of work. For politics, he has this book, The Problem of Political Authority, which out of all the books of libertarian philosophy — almost every single one, if there were some nonlibertarian who said, “What’s a good book to read?” I’d be kind of embarrassed to give them the book because “Here it is, but . . .” It’s not really very convincing to someone that doesn’t already agree. I think what’s great about this book, and really all of Mike’s work, is he always tries to start off with premises that make sense to people that don’t already agree, and then try to get somewhere. And the amazing thing is, he does get places, actually. A lot of people who grow up young with what you might call nerdy interests, they read a lot of science fiction, and you don’t seem to have been very interested in science fiction. You were intensely interested in learning about Joseph Stalin and the history of communism. What’s the fundamental feature in Bryan Caplan–think that has made you, unlike most other nerds, so much more interested in Stalin than science fiction?…

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