Public evidence record
Published podcast speaker
Claim ledger
20 transcript-backed records
01 / belief
“I think that certainly in the ancient world, they would have been spoken. But that doesn’t mean that’s the best way to receive them.”
02 / belief
“I would say, most of the time, I change my mind because people show me that I’m wrong.”
03 / belief
“I think that aspirants don’t really know what they’re doing, and so they’re going to make a lot of mistakes, and she definitely makes a mistake with Stefano.”
04 / belief
“Every time I’d tell the story of the aspiring gangster, I found that it could equally well be read as the story of the ambitious gangster, and there was no way to specify the difference, whereas I didn’t have that kind of problem when I talked about the aspiring student.”
05 / belief
“I think many reasons, but one of them that pops to my head is that often in philosophy, we’re trying to theorize some phenomenon.”
06 / belief
“Who’s responsible?” And I think his answer, in the form of Alcibiades’s speech, is that Alcibiades is responsible.”
07 / belief
“I think that, actually, all aspirants are going to be a little bit jerky. It’ll be characteristic of an aspirant that they’re defective, and so the fact that Stephen Dedalus doesn’t instantiate his own ideals is a sign that he is an aspirant.”
08 / belief
“I think one of the things that makes Hamlet so powerful is that it’s about how the inside of an experience — or the first-personal point of view on it — is significant.”
09 / observation
“I’ve given the part of it that says that it’s going to have to accommodate this phenomenon, but I don’t actually think that you can extrapolate from that the whole theory. And the reason is because aspiration is itself a theory of change, and of how we become someone.”
10 / belief
“I think that Socrates had a very parental relationship — it comes out in Phaedo.”
11 / belief
“What we see over the course of that is him working towards a kind of self-understanding as an artist, and I think he makes genuine progress there.”
12 / commitment
“I think in the case where there’s 30 days left, you would need to be a good person to not give in to very human and very understandable panic in order to live well for the remaining 30 days.”
13 / preference
“I think he’s the best instance of the self-help genre that I’ve ever encountered, in the sense that he has these morals that he puts forward, like tell the truth, keep your room clean, pull yourself together, go for the highest good.”
14 / prediction
“I think you can get by in a 100-year life not being too much attuned to things of eternal significance because there’s so much fascinating stuff out there, and one can go from one thing to the next and not get bored.”
15 / recommendation
“Maybe the best thing to say is to listen and not to say anything because the idea of saying anything at all suggests that you’re giving advice, and that suggests that you’re in a position of knowledge, which you’re probably not until you’ve spent a lot of time listening to them.”
16 / evaluation
“I think first that the division of labor, say, between the refuter and the interlocutor — between let’s say Socrates and Meno — that’s quite different.”
17 / evaluation
“There, far from thinking that I ought to take my counterparts into account, I kind of think I’m actually morally obligated not to because I go down a chain of thought that says it doesn’t matter what I do because all the possibilities will be real in any case.”
18 / recommendation
“I actually think ethically it’s a reading that we ought to try to resist, that there’s something in the text that’s more difficult and more challenging that we escape from if we think either that Socrates is being ironic or that Plato is being ironic about Socrates.”
19 / evaluation
“I don’t believe that if you haven’t had the experience of parenting yourself, that means you’re necessarily missing something.”
20 / evaluation
“In terms of which metaphysics of personal identity we adopt, I don’t know. But if we were just going to let our ethics drive our metaphysics, I would say we should adopt the one that would make death worthy of fear on the one hand, but on the other hand, also make people see that there’s more to the value of their lives than, so to speak, just biological life.”