Conversations with Tyler / episode intelligence
Speakers in the public record
Claim mix
Evidence policy
Every row below preserves an exact excerpt. Identified speakers are linked; unresolved voices are labeled and excluded from people counts.
Claim ledger
27 published records
01 / belief
“The way in which he was philosophical, I think is the greatest influence of his on most people.”
02 / belief
“I think scientific innovation — supported by government, to be clear — is our best chance of solving climate change as a problem.”
03 / belief
“There’s also the interest in genealogy as a method, and world-making as a method, which I have a kind of epistemological interest in. But then, I’m also drawn to the history of feminist thought because I think of lots of the theorists in the feminist tradition as being those kinds of prophets and world makers, trying to do something where they were engaged in forms of conceptual innovation, which were supposed to actually restructure materiality in some sense.”
04 / belief
“Maybe there’s a higher reality as well, but this is the common-sense view. I was just shocked because that wasn’t my view at all.”
05 / belief
“The truth be told, I think his greatest influence on me was just his quite indiscriminate kindness and generosity, philosophically speaking.”
06 / belief
“Then to cite this big external ideological debate and say, “Well, we’re not going to do this for you because we don’t like its symbolism in some other set of debates that we think are more important for you” — that strikes me as wrong.”
07 / belief
“I think you’ve absolutely identified a strain in my thinking, which I’d be tempted to call anarchic more than libertarian.”
08 / belief
“The Greeks had humor without having racism. They had other systems of domination, but they had a great and advanced sense of humor, often directed at intellectuals and philosophers, who, I think, are often very much a worthy target.”
09 / belief
“I would just deny the premise. I think there are so many confounds in the contrast between Iran and Sweden.”
10 / belief
“If we think of male subjection of women, or Mill’s writings in general, he’s really a master at using cross-sectional variation from what he observes to draw inferences.”
11 / belief
“I think I’m not sure about the word consilience in particular, just because it suggests a perfect coherence.”
12 / belief
“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.”
13 / belief
“I loved reading the whole volume that is Against Interpretation, but I think she’s due for a revisiting from me.”
14 / belief
“I think that is to import a property model, which doesn’t totally get our relationship to the self quite right.”
15 / belief
“I think there’s a very clear case grounded in basic political considerations for, and ethical considerations for, why we should decriminalize sex work totally.”
16 / belief
“I think if it’s useful dramatization of that important observation, then it’s useful, but I would have to reread some Sade to be able to comment any further.”
17 / belief
“In my view, men and women are intrinsically different for biological reasons, including in their attitudes towards sex, and more disabled men are interested in taking up that offer than are disabled women.”
18 / evaluation
“I think we should look at the evidence. But I think we should also be intensely cautious about drawing precisely those conclusions that have been drawn over and over again in the history of thinking about women and men, and thinking about gender conclusions that would want to suggest that women are innately drawn towards certain forms of activity and labor and self-expression.”
19 / evaluation
“Part of why I find this whole discourse problematic is because I think we should be suspicious when we find ourselves attracted to data — very, very thin and weak data — that seem to justify beliefs that have held great currency in lots of societies throughout history, in a way that is conducive to the oppression of large segments of the population, in this particular case women.”
20 / evaluation
“Radical sex workers like Juno Mac and Molly Smith, who are the authors of Revolting Prostitutes, are very uninterested in answering the question of should we, in an ideal or even in the real world, have sex workers being subsidized by the state to have sex with disabled people, because they think it’s a massive distraction from the reality of sex work for the vast majority of sex workers, which is true.”
21 / evaluation
“Tyler, the reason I was addressing this question is because I think that some of the ways you frame debates — and I’m a very much an admirer of yours — but they unthinkingly just replicate profoundly misogynistic and racist ways of thinking that come from the American mainstream.”
22 / evaluation
“When you take a population of women who are doing sex work because of those reasons, and then you create a voucher system of the kind you’re describing, I think you’re in problematic territory.”
23 / evaluation
“I in no way endorse that, but I think that I have, and we on left, generally — I’m not including you — people who are on the left, generally, do have more time for that part of the conservative critique than just liberals who think that “Well, no, you can just have a basic pluralistic society in which everyone is, within certain constraints, able to live their vision of the good life so long as it doesn’t impinge on anyone else’s ability to do the same, and that’s totally workable.”
24 / recommendation
“Not even speaking about the utopia, just speaking about how we should think about performative utterances right now, I think we need to address them with a great deal of contextual sensitivity and think about, in general, what is happening in these particular cases.”
25 / evaluation
“I think, for example, that it’s okay that nightclubs shouldn’t allow kids under 18 if you’re in this country, or under 21.”
26 / preference
“I told you I’m adamantly in favor of it, but I think there’s an interesting question about whether decriminalizing sex work would have the hoped-for utopian effect of transforming the basic relations, the wage relation, the relation women have to work, would allow sex workers to refuse sex work.”
27 / evaluation
“A necessary condition but, I think, not sufficient because I think there are cases of ethically problematic sex that are consensual.”