YouSaid · the spoken record

Agnes Callard

lines on the record: 72
first: 2018-04-11
most recent: 2018-04-11
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“So there's a particular context. I think I'm a good lecturer, but I struggle in discussion classes to not lecture, to listen to people. And I've been over the past year, really, I've been experimenting with how to do that better, how to listen, how to teach people who are very new to the kind of talking and thinking that I'm doing with them.”
2018-04-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Agnes Callard on the Theory of Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The question What are my aspirations? That is to what do I aspire? Yes. That's constantly changing, of course. The answer to that question at the moment, I would say I have three areas of aspiration that I'm working on right now. One is fashion. So over the past couple of years, for the first time I became interested in what I wore, like I just had been indifferent to it for the first 39 years of my life. And then somehow I became non-indifferent and I started to care about it. And so that's area number one. Area number two is religion. I struggle a lot with my belief in God and with giving that a place in my life and also with kind of my relation to my religious texts and this past summer I went to a conference on Spinoza and Maimonides that had a big effect on me that kind of pushed me to think more in that direction. So that's another direction in which I consider myself to be aspiring. And then the third one is teaching.”
2018-04-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Agnes Callard on the Theory of Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I've just been refuted many times. When I was on the job market, so like I just got my PhD and I was giving talks. My entire dissertation was refuted by one of my now colleagues who asked me a question in the job interview that, yeah, just showed me to the central distinction I was using in my dissertation didn't work. I then tried to rehabilitate a part of it just to give you some example. And I had been working on it for about a year and I gave it as a talk at MIT and a graduate student there refuted it. Yeah, but this has happened to me a number of times. So I would say most of the time I changed my mind because people show me that I'm wrong.”
2018-04-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Agnes Callard on the Theory of Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That literature was very interesting. But again, that was an accident of thinking that it could connect up. So that's what I do.”
2018-04-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Agnes Callard on the Theory of Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mostly my response to your question is like guilt. I don't feel I do it very well. A lot of what I end up doing is reading things, new things because my grad students are working on them. So my grad students will be working on a certain topic and then there'll be literature that they're using. And so I'll be like, oh, I better read that. I better get to know it. So that's one way that I come to read things. Yeah, I go to talks and I go to conferences and I rarely will just kind of read around in journals. I will do that if there's something I'm working on. And I'll read what's most recently been written on the things I'm working on, but this is why it makes me feel guilty is I know there's really good stuff that I'm just missing because I happen not to be working on it, not to have any students who are working on it and not to go to any conferences. Occasionally I'll hit it anyway. Like there's a there's been a big recent upswell in Lurtron grounding Kit Fine at NYU and a bunch of other people. At a certain point it seemed to me like it might relate. So I read a bunch of that and learned.”
2018-04-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Agnes Callard on the Theory of Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It really occurred to me that there were truths there. That's how I made the transition to, like they say, let's say the humanities from physics. I went to classics grad school because I wanted to read more Greek and Latin. And I loved doing that. But at a certain point, as you progress, you start to move towards like a dissertation. And the closer I got, the clearer it was to me that I did not want to write a dissertation in classics. And so I had to get out, get off that train. I went up through taking all the exams, basically, and then I left. I guess the questions that interested me were more like the substantive questions that the writers were talking about. Rather than something more like a literary question.”
2018-04-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Agnes Callard on the Theory of Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In high school, I was very interested in math and physics. I think it was because there seemed to be truths there. Got to college, and two things happened. So, first, it's that the way that my high school offered physics, they offered up through AP, like a mechanics, but not electricity and magnetism, which was not where you usually start at Chicago. But anyway, so I had to start with electricity and magnetism in the fall of my first year. And the thing with magnetism is that the force goes in the opposite direction. It goes toward like a right angle to what you would expect. And that didn't make any sense to me. And I just remember asking a teacher, like, how could the force go that way? That was sort of like not the question you were supposed to be asking. You were supposed to just like follow the formulas, and right? So I was getting that in my physics class. And at the same time, I was taking, it's a class called human being and citizen in which we read, you know, the Odyssey and Genesis and Plato. And the teacher of that class got me to see that questions like, should you be a vegetarian? Those could be about truths too.”
2018-04-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Agnes Callard on the Theory of Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Professional reasons. Right. So I read new fiction too. So I believe in both. But one thing that I've noticed is that I read the thing differently. Having read it multiple times, right? And I'm a person who is very naturally pulled along by plot. So the first time I read something, I'm very invested in the characters and I just feel bad when things go badly for them. And like a lot of my attention is drawn to that kind of just wanting them to be happy and make money and live well and get married. And it actually often will take me like a couple of readings before I can set that kind of aside and in a way read the work a little bit less diachronically.”
2018-04-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Agnes Callard on the Theory of Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so there's a need, I think, for examples that are going to be a bit tough in response to that kind of pressure. And I think one, it helps if you didn't make the example. And two, it helps if the person who did really understood the thing that they're talking about. And I think literature just gives us that.”
2018-04-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Agnes Callard on the Theory of Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I think that many reasons, but maybe one of them that pops to my head is that often in philosophy we're trying to theorize some phenomena. So say we're trying to theorize aspiration. We're trying to give a theory of it, or weakness of will, right? And the way we do it as philosophers is by using, we often use example, at least to lay out the problem, right? So here's an example of such and such. The problem with examples, though, is that they can collapse under theoretical pressure, right? So there's a constant kind of impulse to rewrite the example and to say, oh, well, what was really going on was, and essentially that impulse comes from the fact that there are certain changes you could make to the example that would make it theoretically easier to analyze.”
2018-04-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Agnes Callard on the Theory of Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And 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. So people are significant not only for what they do, but for how they live inside of their skin or something like that, right? And I mean, Camlet's first speech, or sorry, it's not first, but he's talking, I think it's the beginning of Act two, he says something like all his mourning, he's being criticized for mourning his father too much. Those are trappings in the suits of woe. And I have that within which passes show, right? So Hamlet is from the very beginning pointing to kind of his inner life. And the play points us to that, to the reality of the inner life of people where they're kind of royal status and their large actions and they're fighting in wars and all that becomes kind of irrelevant, becomes the background.”
2018-04-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Agnes Callard on the Theory of Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure, but that's the real world. The whole question is about being connected to reality as opposed to being a kind of figment, right? And if you're living in the world God created, God can create real things. And so you're living in a real world.”
2018-04-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Agnes Callard on the Theory of Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, Descartes, that argument certainly traces to Descartes, but he thought one could get out of it, right? So he thought he had refuted that. Right, he says he's refuted. Let's put it that way. So you can trace it to him, but.”
2018-04-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Agnes Callard on the Theory of Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What would happen if you doubted and you doubted and you doubted and you never came to anything? Like there was never, there wasn't a stop. What guarantee did Descartes have that it would stop ever anywhere, right? That you wouldn't just become kind of despondent and have nothing you could trust anymore. And I think that Hamlet, at least in the early part of the play, he's a bit like that. He's a bit the character of Descartes, if he hadn't found anything to like the, I think.”
2018-04-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Agnes Callard on the Theory of Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are like meditations on the nature of life and emotion and they're not really speeches about the action of people around him, right? So he seems in this weird way, apart from the world, and he seems kind of trapped inside his own head. And so it's almost like maybe somebody, you know, Descartes has this sort of thought experiment that he engages in in the meditations, right? Systematically doubt everything that you believe and see what you come to. And what Descartes comes to is a kind of real truth that he can build upon inside of his own mind. And something my students often ask me about that is like,”
2018-04-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Agnes Callard on the Theory of Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think he definitely reminds me of Descartes in that he is. Not just he, but the whole play is kind of trapped a bit in Hamlet's head. I mean, I don't know of any other play where you get this, I mean, it's so relentless, the kind of Hamlet person. He's in so many scenes, right? He's the other characters aren't, as I see them, aren't very well developed or well-drawn characters. And Hamlet, you know, his monologues.”
2018-04-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Agnes Callard on the Theory of Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't believe that if you haven't had the experience of parenting, Yourself, that means you're necessarily missing something. I think I can't know that. But I do think that philosophy has, like, there are many aspects of the human experience that are under theorized by philosophers, and parenting, but not just parenting, but a whole range of phenomena that go with it, right? So basically a lot of the ethics of sexuality or something, I mean, there are bits of that that have been addressed, but there's a lot of it that hasn't. I don't know that any philosopher before me has ever asked that question that you asked me, right? I ask in my book, like, what does one say to infertile couples? Or what is the ethics of how you deal with people who are infertile? I think that's an important ethical question. And I think that as far as I can tell, it isn't a question people have asked before. So I do think that that, it's an important area of human life that hasn't been sufficiently theorized. And maybe you're right. Were we to do so better, that would affect our theory.”
2018-04-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Agnes Callard on the Theory of Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that Socrates had a very parental relationship to, it comes out on the pheto. That's the best place for it, to the young men who were his followers. You're right, that's not the same thing as raising, like, you know, a young child. He did have children, but who knows how much, I mean, from again, from the feedback suggests.”
2018-04-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Agnes Callard on the Theory of Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, 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 Look, aspiration is a theory of change and of how we become someone. But that theory is in a way secondary. The primary theory is going to have to be like, what's it like to be someone, right? What's the theory of the end point of aspiration? That's what I haven't given, though there are many theories of that that are incompatible with aspiration, and those theories I've refuted, I think, that's not to say that you can use the theory I've given of aspiration to generate a theory of say what kind of end states are worthwhile to aspire to and what is it to be in those states.”
2018-04-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Agnes Callard on the Theory of Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's true that aspiration is step one of a theory of everything, but it isn't true that the reason I can't say what the theory is, but that's because I don't have it, not because I'm hiding it. What you've come away with makes sense to me, because the parts of the book are in different areas of philosophy in the three major areas of ethics, in decision theory or theory of rationality, in moral psychology, and in moral responsibility. And what I'm doing is saying, look, if you want to give a theory of aspiration, you have to kind of break the central apparatus that philosophers have been working with in each of these three areas. If we don't do that, then aspiration becomes impossible. Clearly it's possible. But if you do that, if you say, if you give up on saying the first part of the book, internal, the idea that all reasons are internal, that all of our motivations can be explained in terms of antecedent desires, if you get rid of that, then you're left thinking, well, how do we explain decision and choice, right? We're going to need another new theory. And your thought is, I have it.”
2018-04-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Agnes Callard on the Theory of Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there are so many bad things to say. It's actually kind of hard to come out with the good thing to say. 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 like you're in a position of knowledge, which you're probably not until you've spent a lot of time listening to them.”
2018-04-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Agnes Callard on the Theory of Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I think it's characteristic of something like that genre of self-help that it is part of a larger story and isn't the whole story in the way that philosophy aims to be. So Peterson is pulling against certain cultural trends and his morals are very good in that context, right? So they pull you away when the culture is pulling you too much in one direction. He pulls you in the other direction. That's sort of what the work that he's doing. That's really valuable. But like in another culture, it would be really pernicious because it's not he's not giving you the whole story. He's sort of only giving a part of the story. So that's how I experience him.”
2018-04-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Agnes Callard on the Theory of Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So 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. Those are good morals. I mean, my fourteen year old listens to, he listened to, knew about Jordan Pearson before I did, and he listens to him. And listening to him, I was like, oh, I'm very happy my son is listening to this. This is good for him. This is at least a little bit of the internet that I don't have to try to pull him away from.”
2018-04-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Agnes Callard on the Theory of Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I had this odd feeling he only became known to me quite recently in the past couple weeks. And I was listening to him talk and I was thinking. He sounds a little bit like Socrates but not Socrates and I was like what who is that? Who is he reminding me of? And it's Xenophon Socrates?”
2018-04-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Agnes Callard on the Theory of Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I never had the thought that there was any third choice. Like I have to be one of those. Those are the options. Either you're like Mozart or you're like Beethoven. And I do think I sort of came away from my childhood with the expectation like you better be someone. You better be someone great. Here are the choices for you. Those are the only choices that there are.”
2018-04-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Agnes Callard on the Theory of Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll tell you one story that I haven't thought of for at least a decade that called to mind when I was little. I remember this thing that my mother, I have a terrible memory, so I remember very few things from my childhood. But I remember my mom was extremely into classical music. I'm not at all. But she was telling me about there are two kinds of people. Mozart, there's a Mozart kind of the Beethoven kind. So Mozart, when he thought of some music, it was just perfect. He could just write it down. It was like he was listening to God. And Beethoven would sort of write it and rewrite it and rewrite it and cross it out. And I don't remember that she ever said this, but I remember coming away from that thinking, oh, I guess I'm the Beethoven kind.”
2018-04-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Agnes Callard on the Theory of Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For Lila, and I also think it was aspiration. Does that show that aspiration, so I think aspiration is mimetic, but I don't think it's crudely, I mean, I think it just is mimetic. It's imitative. And when we imitate, we often go wrong and make missteps. But I don't think there's any other way to learn.”
2018-04-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Agnes Callard on the Theory of Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, so I think that aspirins 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. And she clearly, I mean, I think she's trying to get out of marrying, which one is it Martella or Michaela, one of the Solara brothers, right? And she becomes very enamored with this thought, both her and Ellen adew, of becoming the kind of machinatrix behind her life. Like she's going to take control of her life. And they think her and Island Eleanor think that they have found a way to be real agents in this world that is like pushing them around with respect to marriage. Now, they're totally wrong about that. So, I think you're right that this was a misstep.”
2018-04-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Agnes Callard on the Theory of Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Him working towards a kind of self-understanding as an artist. And I think he makes genuine progress there. But you're right. He doesn't make a lot of progress with respect to how he treats other people. And that seems to be something that he doesn't care about that much. And that's consistent with my view. So my view is only that when you aspire to something, that thing has to actually be good. You don't have to be good in other respects.”
2018-04-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Agnes Callard on the Theory of Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, he says it's part of my view that people can't aspire to something without knowing that they aspire to it. So aspiration has to be as transparent as it can be given that you only have a partial grasp, right? So he couldn't be aspiring to something else that he is not aware of. Stephen is from the very beginning of the novel, he hears the sounds of words and he's interested in their sounds and in the way that they connect up to one another and he's asking himself questions about you know his place in the universe. And what we see over the course of that is”
2018-04-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Agnes Callard on the Theory of Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 Daedalus doesn't instantiate his own ideals is a sign that he is an aspirin. Now, the thing is that Stephen's aspirations pull him away from other people rather than towards them. And so it's not actually that clear to me that his jerkiness gets sort of ameliorated over the course of a novel. His aspirations are aesthetic. But I think that he says.”
2018-04-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Agnes Callard on the Theory of Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And every time I 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 talk about the aspiring student. So what I came to conclude was that the reason I was running into this roadblock is that you can only aspire, or let me put it this way. If we see someone, we only count them as aspiring if we think that the thing they're moving towards is in fact good. We wouldn't call it aspiration otherwise”
2018-04-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Agnes Callard on the Theory of Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, why didn't think this when I started writing the book actually? I thought you could aspire to anything that you could value. So I think people sometimes value things that aren't valuable. People make mistakes in valuing. And I thought, right, well, if aspiration is the acquisition of value, you could acquire false values as well as true ones. And we want to tell the story of how you do that, right? But as I was writing the book and I tried to tell that story, I kept on not being able to tell it. So I kept on like I tried to use the example of a gangster, right? Someone who aspires to become a gangster. And the problem that I ran into was that when I would describe the process of the person becoming a gangster, I couldn't find a way to specify that what was going on there was aspiration as opposed to a phenomenon I want to distinguish from aspiration called ambition. So when you're ambitious, you're not trying to come to value something new. You're just trying to satisfy desires or values you already have, but that are maybe large in scale.”
2018-04-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Agnes Callard on the Theory of Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“you won't be able to say much, right? So that's not all of your reason. That's just what I call the distal face of your reason, right? The face that looks away to the person you're going to become. But then there are also going to be kind of bits of your motivation that are a little more embarrassing, like, oh, you know, a bunch of people I admire in the class, or I think that people will like me more. I have some ideal or some image or some fantasy of a kind of enriched life. And I see classical music as part of that. And I think those are also parts of the, that's the proximate face of the proleptic reason, the part that you can now grasp. But you can see that that's not all of it.”
2018-04-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Agnes Callard on the Theory of Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then there's a question well, why should you do that? Like, why should you take the music appreciation class, right? You might say, Well, the value of music. I mean, classic music is this great thing, right? But you don't see it as valuable, presumably. That's why you have to take the class. And so there's a kind of paradox that would suggest, well, we should never try to get ourselves interested or into new things because in order to have a reason to do that, we'd already have to have the interest. And so proleptic reasons are supposed to solve this problem. And they are the reasons that you act on when you are working your way into a new domain of value. And what I say characterizes these reasons is that they have kind of two faces or they're kind of divided. They have two parts. And so the one part is like, you know, if you were to say, what's your reason? Like, why are you taking this class, right? You might say, well, the intrinsic value of classical music is one of the great goods that our civilization has produced, something like that. But like when you say that, your words are going to be a little bit hollow because you don't, if they ask you to say,”
2018-04-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Agnes Callard on the Theory of Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So what I'm trying to explain is how do people get themselves to care about things that they don't yet care about? So suppose that you want to come to appreciate a certain kind of music, that's example I use in the book more than you do”
2018-04-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Agnes Callard on the Theory of Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it seems to me the first question is ought we to fear death? Because then we can ask under what system will we fear less? I think it's rational to fear death. But I also think that The rationality of that is bound up with the demand for courage in the face of death. So we ought to fear death and we ought to in some sense fight that fear. One thing that the fear of death can lead you to is to thinking that dying is the worst thing that can happen to you and that like there's no fate worse than death. And people can do terrible things if they think that. It's important to see that one's life is valuable and has meaning and therefore to fear death, but it isn't the most important thing that there is. And so I guess 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”
2018-04-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Agnes Callard on the Theory of Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so 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.”
2018-04-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Agnes Callard on the Theory of Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are real, though they're not actual. We live in the actual world, right? And I have these counterparts in the other possible worlds. And the part of his theory that I always had the hardest time with is the ethical part because it looks like if I do a good thing, then in a sense, like I know my counterparts because all the other possibilities have to be sort of speak saturated. So my counterparts are going to do the bad thing. So am I just keeping my corner of the possible world space clean? And like how could that be? How could you make sense of the motivation if those worlds are real?”
2018-04-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Agnes Callard on the Theory of Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I don't think Sheffler would say it does or should matter because his thought is that the valuing that I do now is actually predicated on certain assumptions that I make about future generations. And these other copies, my valuing isn't predicated on them because I didn't even know about them until like a couple minutes ago, right? So I couldn't have been. But you can still ask should they matter, right? And I haven't thought about that, but I've thought about a related question that comes up with David Lewis's philosophy. So David Lewis makes a kind of similar point in the field of sort of metaphysics as opposed to physics, saying that there are these possible worlds.”
2018-04-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Agnes Callard on the Theory of Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In a position, let's say it's similar to like being in a position of power, I think, having power of any kind, wealth, political power, makes life more difficult in the sense that you need more virtue to live well. And 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. I mean, this would also, it's different, but not that different from the case in which you find that there's 30 days left of your life, right? Similar issues are going to arise. I think it's worse in the case where there's 30 days left for everybody. But we often describe people in those situations as having courage or being admirable. And I think it's because the situation calls up the virtue that's in them.”
2018-04-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Agnes Callard on the Theory of Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, for slightly different reasons, I think. Virtue, the more virtue you have, the more difficult the circumstances can be in which you still act and live well, right? So if you're in relatively easy circumstances, like even just being an okay person is enough. But when you start, I don't know.”
2018-04-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Agnes Callard on the Theory of Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that hunger will always make you want to eat, but will hunger is hunger enough to make eating kind of meaningful to you and deserving of your attention that way. And I think it isn't.”
2018-04-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Agnes Callard on the Theory of Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At least some of those activities stay riveting for us over the course of our lives because their meaning changes. So eating, say, right? I like to eat when I was five and I like to eat now. But I eat very differently than I did then. And if I didn't, if I hadn't sort of changed and developed how I eat and what I eat, I think I would have gotten bored of it. And so there's a question about the limits of that development, right? How high up can one go with eating?”
2018-04-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Agnes Callard on the Theory of Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fascinating stuff out there, and one can go from one thing to the next and not get bored. But if we're talking about eternity or even thousands of years, you better find something to occupy you that is really riveting in the way that I think only eternal things are. So I think that what you're really asking is something like, could I be a God? And I think, well, if you became godlike, you could. And then it would be okay.”
2018-04-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Agnes Callard on the Theory of Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, they're less for. One thing is that If you're kind of having to live with yourself for a very long time, if you're immortal or even just live for a couple thousand years, right? And a bad self, I think, is hard to live with. But by bad, I don't just mean sort of like, let's say, cruel to people or unjust. I also mean not attuned to things of eternal significance. 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”
2018-04-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Agnes Callard on the Theory of Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And Socrates essentially saying, look, you've turned away from me and you hate the fact that you're in love with me, i.e. with the philosophical life. I mean, look, it's sort of up to the reader whose side you're going to come down on, right? And whether or not Plato comes down on Socrates or Alcibiades, I don't know about that. But I guess at the very least, there are materials in the symposium for what would have been, you know, what is Socrates' response to the claim that he corrupted Alcibiades? Socrates' response is, no, Alcibiades didn't try hard enough. He turned away from, he had the door open to him and he walked the other way.”
2018-04-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Agnes Callard on the Theory of Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Socrates has a really interesting response to Alcibiades' speech. So, Alcibiades gives this whole speech about like, it's horrible to be in love with Socrates. Look at what he's done to me, right? He's put me in this terrible state. So Alcibiades, in effect, is making the case against Socrates, right? Then Socrates says it's really clear what you've been doing. You've been trying to become the lover of Agathon and make me fall in love with you.”
2018-04-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Agnes Callard on the Theory of Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Culture or not, I do think that's at least some of what the symposium is about. And I think Plato is trying to defend Socrates. He's trying to say, let's take exhibit A for the claim that Socrates corrupted the youth Alcibiades, right? And let's look at, let's get to the very heart of what Socrates' effect on Alcibiades, and let's look at him slipping away from Socrates, like towards ambition. Let's look inside of that and see whose fault is it? Who's responsible? And I think his answer in the form of Alcibiades' speech is that Alcibiades is responsible.”
2018-04-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Agnes Callard on the Theory of Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Socrates gave rise to a whole bunch of Socrates imitators, right, as well as people who Socrates, people who would write what Socrates wrote like Xenophon and Plato. And Plato's reflecting on this on the kind of role of Socrates in the culture. And so you start with that and you end with Alcibiades saying like, here's what it's like to be around Socrates, to be affected by Socrates, right? That question, the question of the role of Socrates in the culture, right? And the place of the kind of speech he gives in the context of the kinds of speeches other people gave, right? You know, what's it like for Socrates to be one among many speakers in a group? I guess I find it hard not to think that that's at least in part about the question of was he guilty? That did the Athenians make the correct decision? Did he corrupt the youth? Was he a positive influence in this?”
2018-04-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Agnes Callard on the Theory of Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source