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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“No, no, they all they all actually at the early in the dialogue they say this is what we usually do is get drunk they had gotten drunk the night before they've got hangovers and they decide for the purposes in order to have a more civilized conversation not to drink that all gets overturned with the arrival of Alcibiades but for the first bunch of speeches actually there isn't any drinking Or maybe it's maybe it's moderate I'm actually maybe not remembering it's maybe moderate drinking but in any case they cut back on the drinking in order to speak so there's a sense in which the dialogue presents the kind of friendly conversation the kind of friendly conversation that they're having as being a bit intention with the drinking what do I think the dialogue as a whole is about I think at least one thing it's about is suggested by the frame and the ending it's about the cult of Socrates so that's the very bit at the very beginning right people are telling stories about Socrates and they're also imitating Socrates, they're like walking around barefoot and stuff, right? And there I do think is a bit of like a joke.”
2018-04-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Agnes Callard on the Theory of Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of course, I'm going to say either Socrates or Alcibiades. I like Aristophanes' speech too. It's beautiful. Socrates' speech. Affects me the most intellectually. I think when I read it, it's one of the places that I go to for understanding the theory of the forms and what it would be for one to work one's way up to a form, something like that. It's a short, concentrated bit of text that addresses that issue. So that's really great. But Alcibiades' speech is more moving to me. And it's one of the places that I would go to in the corpus for trying to understand what it's like to meet someone like Socrates and to encounter, to like, for him to be in the world with you, to be one of the people in the world that's around Socrates. Alcibiades speech is the best place for that. So those would be my two favorites for different reasons.”
2018-04-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Agnes Callard on the Theory of Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The goal of philosophical knowledge? It's one that I think was best articulated by William James in his famous article, The Will. On the other hand, you don't want to believe anything false. And James thought that the sort of science and epistemology of his time was too obsessed with that second goal, right? Well, if there's any doubt at all, just don't believe it. And he was pointing out that we had this other goal too. I don't agree with James about how we solve the problem, but I think he's right that there's a real problem there, that the goal threatens to pull itself apart. And it's in those contexts, I think, that the adversarial division of labor makes sense.”
2018-04-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Agnes Callard on the Theory of Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know whether it's aiming at truth either. What I would mean by aiming at truth is aiming at knowledge. And I would think that most of the time the knowledge would be at most kind of proximate goal, but not an ultimate goal. I think that the reason why we have adversarial systems for pursuing certain goals is that there's actually a tension inside the goal itself. The goal sort of threatens to pull itself apart. In the case of justice, right, we have the goal that we want to convict the guilty and we want to acquit the innocent. And those are not the same goal. And they pull apart a little bit because if you're really, really, really committed to acquitting the innocent, you'll be like, look, if there's any doubt, if there's any possible doubt of any kind, right, we should acquit. And then you're not going to get to the other goal. So it's that tension inside of the goal itself of justice that's generating the need for the adversarial system. I think there's a similar tension in...”
2018-04-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Agnes Callard on the Theory of Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, generally speaking, most of the private sector is not aiming at justice. And it's not aiming at the particular form of justice.”
2018-04-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Agnes Callard on the Theory of Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And at the very least, we believe it at the time. And I think that's quite important. You know, when you say most arguments are bad arguments or wrong, I mean, I think in a way that's right, but I think we can't, it's really hard to be the Socrates' interlocutor. I mean, it's much harder to be the interlocutor than to be Socrates. And I think Socrates very much appreciates that. He's very grateful to his interlocutors and he praises them constantly. To put something forward is an act of courage. And especially when you know people are going to tear it down. But I think tearing it down is the right response. So let me defend that as opposed to the helping. So about the justice system versus the private sector, generally speaking, they have different goals.”
2018-04-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Agnes Callard on the Theory of Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think most, I mean, if you go to a philosophy talk about free will, they're not going to say that there's free will or there isn't. They're going to say something like much smaller and much more complicated. It's something that they feel they can say. We say what we feel we can say, right?”
2018-04-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Agnes Callard on the Theory of Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that it's actually rationally required in the sense that to believe, like say I say, I believe there's snow on the ground outside, that's a belief of mine, right? And then I also believe that's true, right? And then I can also say there's snow on the ground outside. Those are just three ways of saying the same thing, right? So in order to have any beliefs at all, you have to think that those.”
2018-04-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Agnes Callard on the Theory of Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's been a lot of discussion about the underrepresentation of certain groups of people in philosophy, women and minorities, and the fact that some practices that we have in philosophy might be contributing to that. So there can be quite a lot of rudeness and just nastiness in the way that people conduct themselves. And that perhaps that kind of aggression is putting groups of people off of the discipline. And I think that's an important reflection that we're having. However, in the context of that, I heard several people say, yeah, why do we even refute one another? Why are we doing it that way? And that made me think, uh-oh, somebody better explain why we're doing that, because that's really important. We have to do that. We have to not do it badly. We have to not do it in an inhumane way. But I think it's essential to philosophy. It's sort of what philosophy is that we refute one another. But that's, in a sense, I agree with Socrates. So I think we do the right amount of it, though I think there's some amount of it's being threatened, right?”
2018-04-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Agnes Callard on the Theory of Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I actually ended up giving a different talk at Princeton, but I did give that talk at Michigan. I changed my mind last minute. Anyway, I think we do roughly the right amount of it in philosophy. I wrote that talk because”
2018-04-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Agnes Callard on the Theory of Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think Plato rated them highly, so there's a question what rating he wanted he had, right? You read, I mean, any philosopher, right? You read Kant, you read Adam Smith, you read Hume, and you're looking for the arguments, right? But in Plato, you don't need to look because Socrates would be like, so do you think this? Yes, you think this? Yes. And that just shows you what the argument is. But I think that taking that in, it's easier to take that in visually than through hearing.”
2018-04-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Agnes Callard on the Theory of Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. It just means that, well, there were certain limits at that time. I think that my own feeling is the ideal way to engage with the dialogues is to read them and then talk about them with people. Ideally, you talk about them with the text in front of you so you can quote bits and read bits out loud. But I guess I personally, I think it might depend on, you know, personally like how you take in information or something, but I want to be able to stop and I want to be in a kind of control over my thinking about like the argument because a lot of the time what's going on in the text is the presentation of an argument. And one thing that I think must have appealed to Plato about the dialogue form is that there is no, I can't think of any more direct way to just put propositions on paper like on parchment, you know, whatever papyrus.”
2018-04-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Agnes Callard on the Theory of Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I actually think ethically it's a reading that we ought to try to resist, that there's a kind of something there in 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. Sorry, I should have said the people who accuse Socrates of being ironic are like Thrasymachus and Callicles. They're not the good guys or the friends, right? So there's a you know, the fact that it's those people accusing him suggests at least something about how Plato wanted us to think about the charge of Socratic irony.”
2018-04-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Agnes Callard on the Theory of Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I don't share that reading. One thing that's interesting is that Plato at several points has Socrates' interlocutors accuse him of irony? They use the word erna, irony, our same word. And Socrates, in the apology, says, now you guys are going to think. People are always saying this about me. They're always thinking I'm being ironic. And I think that he isn't. I just think that he is serious in everything that he says, but it's really hard to read him that way. There's a way in which our tendency to think that Socrates Is a way of pulling his words away from us because if he doesn't mean it, it doesn't have a kind of bearing on us, right?”
2018-04-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Agnes Callard on the Theory of Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the city in which there is this division of labor, right, is being used as an analog for the soul, right? Where all that's going to be within one person, right? So within one person, you can have all the different jobs. You don't need anybody else. In a sense, you can do it by yourself. And I think I take that to be a platonic thought rather than a Socratic thought. It's a platonic, let's say, way of deploying a Socratic thought. But maybe let me say something about sort of taking a step back, sort of like about your overall approach, the approach that I'm hearing coming out in several of these questions. So it's not, I would say that the dominant reading of Socrates in the literature has always been to think that he is at least some of the time either being ironic or being made fun of by Plato.”
2018-04-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Agnes Callard on the Theory of Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think first that the division of labor, say between the speaker and the interlocutor, sorry, between the refuter and the interlocutor, right? So between, say, Socrates and Mino, I think that's quite different. So there was a kind of a reason why I said that was the moral of everything up to the republic. And I think in the republic, you get, you really get like Plato's wheels start turning sort of in a way, more than Socrates's, right? And so I think what you get is the image, the idea that maybe you don't need an adversarial division of epistemic labor. Maybe one person, the philosopher, can do it all on his own.”
2018-04-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Agnes Callard on the Theory of Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Acquire knowledge, like how do you acquire knowledge when you don't have it? And Socrates sort of came up with a method for doing that. And his method was, I call it the adversarial division of epistemic labor. So if you and I both want to find the truth, right, we can actually divide up the process of finding the truth or acquiring knowledge into two subordinate jobs and you do one and I do one. And if we each do our job together we can inquire. So that's what I take Socratic philosophy to be doing and the dialogues present that to us.”
2018-04-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Agnes Callard on the Theory of Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A couple different things, but maybe I'll give like two things that are going on is there's a set of ethical doctrines that are the groundwork of Socrates' life that are being laid out in those dialogues. And they have slogans. So they're actually really easy to give you in terms of bullet points. They're things like a good man can't be harmed, weakness of will is impossible. Knowledge is virtue. Doing injustice is worse than suffering it. Those are sometimes referred to as Socratic intellectualism, right? So there's Socrates' rules for living. So one of the things that dialogues are doing is giving you that. I think the other thing they're doing is giving you what philosophy is at the time. That is, they're showing you philosophy. As I understand it, Socratic philosophy is a kind of solution to a problem. Well, Sortamino's problem, but it could be put in a bunch of different ways about how to.”
2018-04-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Agnes Callard on the Theory of Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Could I maybe give my take on? All the dialogues that are conventionally dated before the Republic, say, including Republic One. So that's a lot of dialogue. Don't worry about Timaeus. Right, exactly. So I think that...”
2018-04-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Agnes Callard on the Theory of Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. So why not just give up, right? And Socrates says, well, let me tell you a story. And he tells kind of a long story about sort of the opposite of the afterlife, the pre-life, right? The life that we had before we were born. And, you know, maybe we can inquiry can make sense because we're in some sense remembering knowledge we had in the pre-life. And then after he says that, he says, now this all might be wrong. I can't really stand by any of it. Here's the bit though that I'll stand by. We'll be better and braver if we inquire than if we don't. So even Socrates couches the theory of recollection in a kind of ethical framework, similar ethical framework to what he'll couch later the myths in, right, at the ends of some of the dialogues. Now, I don't see Plato, I don't see where Plato is saying that that's wrong. In a way, Socrates is already saying it.”
2018-04-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Agnes Callard on the Theory of Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know what Plato is trying to tell us. I don't think in the Mino, he doesn't quite come out and say learning is recollection. Here's what he does. He's faced with a paradox that Mino puts forward, right, to the effect that there's no point to try to inquire about anything ever, right? Because you can't inquire about what you don't know. Because how would you even know how to start and you can't inquire about what you do know? Because why would you inquire about what you already know?”
2018-04-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Agnes Callard on the Theory of Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's reasonable to conclude that one thing Plato meant to do was to preserve the memory and the activity of Socrates. So there was this guy, there was this amazing guy who walked around asking people questions and thereby inventing a new way of thinking and a new way of life. But he didn't write anything down. And I think not just Plato, but a lot of people didn't want that to die with Socrates. So I think that was one of Plato's motivations. And yeah, what he did was a good way of achieving that goal.”
2018-04-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Agnes Callard on the Theory of Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source