Rob Hopkins: Okay, welcome. Welcome to this New York
Institute of Philosophy public lecture.
I'm Rob Hopkins, the chair--that's my
chair, actually, Cian, but that's okay. I am
the chair of the department and I like to
have my chair. The New York Institute of
Philosophy is a research center housed
within the department that sponsors
multi-year research projects, workshops
conferences, and sometimes, as today,
public lectures. So that's what we're
about to enjoy. And to start the pleasure
I'm going to ask my colleague, professor
Jessica Moss, to introduce today's speaker.
[Audience applauds]
Jessica Moss: Okay, welcome everybody. So I'll just 
say a word more about the New York Institute
of Philosophy and its public mission. So,
as Rob said, it is an institute and it is
housed in NYU's philosophy department.
And for the most part it does the kind
of things that professional academic
philosophers do, where people who work in
professional academic philosophy talk to
each other about quite specialized
topics: professors, graduate students,
postdoctoral fellows, things like that.
But at least once a year it likes to
have an outside face, and in fact more
often--we do also have an outreach
program where we bring philosophy to, say,
12 year-olds in West Harlem, with the
help of pizza, generously funded by the
New York Institute. But we also like to
have a lecture once a year of public
philosophy, to try to turn outward from
academia and bring that to the public.
Now you might think that that's a
interesting, radical thing for
philosophers to do. We'll hear quite a lot
more about this in a moment, but as
someone who studies Plato,
I want to say Plato is thought to have
been at least one of the first to use
the word 'philosophy', and he has Socrates,
his character, say, "I do philosophy all
the time". And then he explains what he
means by that: "I go around and I talk
to anyone who will listen, and I try to
convince you to examine your life and to
care about pursuing wisdom." So philosophy,
at least at its roots, was not this kind
of inward-looking, specialized, academic
thing, but this outward--anybody who will
listen. So thank you for coming and being
some of the people who will listen. I
don't have much more to say about
what public philosophy is, but that's
okay, because we have brought in a
professional. So it is my great pleasure
to introduce Kieran Setiya. So Kiran is a
very eminent philosopher, working mainly
in the areas of ethics and the
philosophy of action, epistemology, and
the philosophy of mind. Kieran is now a
senior professor at MIT, which has one of
the best philosophy departments in the
world. And before that he was at another
great philosophy department, the
University of Pittsburgh, where I had the
great fortune to be his colleague. And
Kieran is the author of some incredibly
well-respected and influential books,
works of academic philosophy. He has
three books in the area of ethics and
philosophy of action. There's Reasons
Without Rationalism, Knowing Right From
Wrong--yes!--and Practical Knowledge. That
last is a collection that came out
recently from Oxford University Press, a
collection of many of his excellent
articles. Now I had thought that people only
get collections of their articles when
they're sort of nearing retirement.
But Kieran was maybe oh just about 40 when
this happened. And that leads me to my
next theme, which is that Kieran has
always been precocious. So I believe he
maybe started college at the age of 16.
When we were teaching at Pitt a lot of
the graduate students resented him
because they were about 10 years older
than him. They loved him too though.
But as part of that precocity, just maybe,
oh well long before 40, Kieran got a real
head start on an important part of life
for everybody, the midlife crisis. And
fortunately for us he not only had a
midlife crisis, but he also had really
insightful and fascinating and 
wise-beyond-his-years and helpful
philosophical thoughts about it, which he
wrote up for us in a book called Midlife:
A Philosophical Guide. If I had images I
would have an image--there's a great
cover of a glass-half-full. This is a
wonderful book that you can buy in
bookstores everywhere. And I highly
recommend it. It's been translated into more
than ten languages. It is one of the 100
top selling books on Amazon in Spain,
I've just been told.
[Audience laughs]
But it's been
wonderfully reviewed all over the place,
The Guardian and The New Yorker and The
Economist and the LA Review of Books and
the New York Times has published some.
And there are many, many wonderful
responses and reviews. I highly recommend
it, not only as a book for you to read,
but also when you need a birthday
present for someone of a certain age, who
has a slight sense of humor--but it
really is a wonderful and wise book. And
it draws on philosophy and it draws on
literature to answer one of the big
questions of life, which is, how to deal
with the issues that face you when you
are of a certain age, and one of the
things you realize--and this is one of
the themes, but one of the main themes of
the book, is that there are certain
decisions you've made now that have
closed off certain possibilities. There
are certain things that you might once
have wanted to do or be that you now
never will. And Kieran writes about as a
young person having maybe wanting to be a
doctor, or maybe wanting to be a poet. And
how those are choices that he abandoned,
and that's not the life he lives. So he
lives a wonderful life as an incredibly
eminent academic philosopher at a
wonderful department with many devoted
students, he has a wonderful wife and
child, and yet those are lives he has to
say goodbye to. And the book is not a
midlife book that tells you how to
change your life by getting a new job or
a new spouse or a new car. It's a book
instead that tells you, drawing on the
wisdom of Aristotle onwards, how--and
particularly the wisdom of Kieran--how to
draw on philosophical insights to accept
and understand the life that you do have,
and in particular to think about how it
means not to have these other
possibilities. Now it's a beautiful irony
that in the process of writing that book,
and having that book so well received
and being widely interviewed about that
book and so on, Kiran actually has--well, I
don't suppose he's exactly become a poet
or a doctor, but he has transformed.
He is no longer merely a preeminent
academic philosopher. He has also become
a wonderful and highly regarded exemplar
of what he is going to talk to us about
today, namely public philosophy. 
So, Kieran Setiya.
[Audience applauds]
Kieran Setiya: Thank you very much. Thank you all for
coming, and thank you very much to the
New York Institute of philosophy for
doing what it does, and, in particular, for
inviting me to talk today about public
philosophy. You may be wondering what is
public philosophy. So let me give you
some examples. This event possibly is
going to count as public philosophy.
There's the New York Times column, the
Stone, which often features short
philosophical essays. The New Statesman
just started a column of philosophers.
It's increasingly common to see in just
the regular op-ed pages of newspapers
essays by philosophers about issues of
current interest. There are books like
How to be a Stoic, The Logic of Misogyny,
How Fascism Works. There are events like
the Brooklyn night of philosophy and
ideas. There are philosophers
increasingly appearing on radio and TV
talking about contemporary issues. So
that's broadly speaking the topic I'm
going to be addressing today. I'm gonna
start by confessing my discomfort with
the phrase 'public philosophy', with its 
subtle echo of public indecency or
public urination. So the suggestion that
we're doing in public something that
should properly be done in the privacy
of one's own home. But on second
thoughts it occurred to me that might be
a deliberate allusion, because, after all,
some of the original public philosophers,
Diogenes and the cynics, would shit and
masturbate and fuck in public, and
perhaps the phrase 'public philosophy' is
designed precisely to remind us of that
glorious history. Now in saying this, I'm
using the phrase 'public philosophy' in
one of the meanings distinguished by
my source, my authority, Wikipedia, which
is--distinguishes two meanings. One is
public philosophy as doing philosophy in
public for a non-academic
audience. Wikipedia mentions another
meaning, which is public philosophy as
philosophy applied
to issues of public interest, especially
topical ones that have to do with
matters of social and political urgency.
And those meanings are often conflated
or sort of run together, in part because
a lot of philosophy that is public in
the first sense, sort of aimed at a wider
audience, meets both definitions. It's
also public in the second sense: it is
aimed at issues of social and political
urgency. It is, in effect, philosophy as
social and political engagement. And so
in the shorthand I'm going to adopt for
today at least,
I'm gonna call philosophy that's public
in both senses 'activist philosophy'. Now
that does seem to fit the cynics. So the
cynics, despite Jessica's praise for
Plato, the cynics dismissed Plato's
philosophy of immaterial forms as airy
nonsense.
Diogenes called Plato's discourse a
waste of time, and the cynics urged,
instead of writing philosophy the way
Plato did, engaging in a kind of
revolution against social norms. So I'm
gonna be talking today about both public
philosophy that is activist, and
philosophy that is addressed at a wider
audience but is not activist. Really what
I'm going to be doing is making a plea
for the value of public philosophy that
is not activist philosophy. Now having
said that, I see value in both, and I am
myself interested in both. So I wrote
this book about midlife, which cannot
really be said to be aimed at an issue
of urgent public interest, although it is
an issue of urgent interest to some of
us. I've also been recently working on
and thinking about the ethics of climate
change, so I don't at all discount the
value of activist philosophy, although I
do, as I will explain later in the talk,
have some doubts or questions about it. I
will say, as a brief digression, there is
one kind of public philosophy that I do
wish to denounce briefly, which is the
phenomenon of successful philosophers
whose--who have reached a certain eminence on
the basis of careers supported by the
open-mindedness
and generosity of their colleagues,
writing public denunciations of
philosophy, in which they announce that
the work of all their colleagues is
garbage. That is a kind of public
philosophy that I--the value of which I
will certainly not be defending. But I
think both both activist and non-activist 
public philosophy--I'll leave you
to fill in the names of those people--
I'll pause briefly for you to remember them.
Anyway. So I'm gonna be talking
about the value of non-activist public
philosophy, in part because I think the
value of non-activist public philosophy
is less often appreciated, and the case
for it is less often made. And--just
an example of the kind of tendency for
philosophers thinking about public
philosophy to focus on its activist
dimensions, a recent essay on the APA--
the American Philosophical Association--
blog by David Johnson included this
quote: "As far as I'm concerned, if a piece
doesn't address an issue of current
potential civic concern, it's not
worthwhile as public philosophy." And I
want to resist that narrowing of our
sense of what philosophy can and should
be for a wider audience. So I'm going to
work towards some conclusions about this
topic by doing some philosophy in
connection with a case study that I will
explore at length. The cautionary tale of
an iconic activist philosopher, John
Stuart Mill. So John Stuart Mill, here he is,
was born in 1806. He was the son of James
Mill, who is a Scottish historian,
political economist, and philosopher.
James Mill was a disciple of Jeremy
Bentham, who was the first great
utilitarian in moral philosophy. So his
idea was that the right action is the
one that produces the greatest happiness
of the greatest number. James Mill met
Bentham in 1808 when his son was 2, and
was an immediate convert. And on the
principle that charity begins at home,
he decided to use his son's life and his
son's education as an experiment in the
greatest happiness of the greatest
number, in the maximization of utility. He
decided that his son would become an
instrument for the maximization of the
general happiness. It was an education or
an experiment that Isaiah Berlin would
later call "an appalling success". So it
was a success because John Stuart Mill
did go on to be probably the most
influential British philosopher and
public intellectual of the 19th century,
and an important social reformer;
appalling for the loneliness and
deprivation of his early years. So he was
sheltered from interaction by--with other
children by his father. And he 
was educated at an alarming rate. So John
Stuart Mill learned Greek at age three,
he was reading Plato by seven, he learned
Latin at eight, he was reading Newton's
Principia at age eleven. His teenage
years were spent on logic, political
economy, psychology, and law. By the time--
age of 15 he was finally ready for
philosophy, and at that point he started
reading Bentham. And then at the age of
twenty, already an accomplished thinker
in his own right, John Stuart Mill had a
nervous breakdown. When he describes his
nervous breakdown later, he does so in
terms that are at once stark and rather
puzzling. He says, "I was in a dull state
of nerves such as everybody is
occasionally liable to, unsusceptible to
enjoyment or pleasurable excitement. One
of those moods when what is pleasure at
other times becomes insipid or
indifferent. In this frame of mind it
occurred to me to put the question
directly to myself: suppose that all your
objects in life were realized, that all
the changes in institutions and opinions
which you were looking forward to could
be completely effected at this very
instant. Would this be a great joy and
happiness to you? And an irrepressible
self-consciousness distinctly answered,
'No!'" Why? Why would the achievement of your
deepest desires become a matter of
indifference, leave you feeling empty in
this way? What had gone wrong in Mill's
life? Now you might say, what had gone
wrong in Mill's life? So many things had gone
wrong in Mill's life! So he had this
domineering father who had imposed on
him a life project that he had not in
some sense really chosen for himself. He
had lived a childhood of isolation and
deprivation of social contact,
limitation of close relationships. There
were all kinds of reasons why Mill might
have been depressed. What I want to look
at in particular, though, are the diagnoses of
Mill's breakdown that he himself gives in
his autobiography, which is one of the
great works of public philosophy. In
the chapter of his autobiography where
he talks about his nervous breakdown, he
asks himself, what can we learn about
how to live a decent life, how to live a
good life, from the fact that I was
left in despair at this point in my
development? And he suggests two diagnoses
of what went wrong. I want to talk
about both of them. He says there were
two marked reversals in his thinking, two
things he sort of discovered on the
basis of his nervous breakdown, and that
helped him to recover from it. So here's
the first. He says, "I never, indeed, wavered
in the conviction that happiness is the
test of all rules of conduct, and the end
of life. But I now thought that this end
was only to be attained by not making it
the direct end. Those only are happy, I
thought, who have their minds fixed on
some object other than their own
happiness; on the happiness of others, on
the improvement of mankind, even on some
art or pursuit, followed not as a means
but as itself an ideal end. Aiming thus
at something else, they find happiness
by the way." This is an idea that has come
to be called by philosophers 'the paradox
of egoism': the idea that the exclusive
pursuit of one's own happiness turns out
to be, frustratingly, an impediment to
happiness. It's an idea that goes back at
least to Joseph Butler in the 18th
century, and subsequent philosophers have
developed it in various ways. It's also
been an idea that recent work over the
last few decades in psychology has
suggested is on to something. So the sort
of key idea here
is that a crucial condition of happiness
is caring about things other than
oneself. That doesn't necessarily mean
you have to be altruistic. What you care
about might be baseball or philosophy or
particular people, so your loved
ones--not humanity at large or the
greater good. As you care about those
things, the potential sources of
happiness in your life, although
also the sources of vulnerability, grow.
So I think this is an interesting idea. I
don't want to spend too much time on it,
though, in connection with Mill, because
it's such an odd diagnosis for him to
make of what happened to him. After all,
Mill's problem was surely not an undue
devotion to himself. It wasn't that he
was too concerned with his own happiness.
He had been brought up to think that his
role in life was to promote the greatest
happiness of the greatest number. If
anything, his problem was the opposite of
this. And so in fact it's tempting to
cite in connection with Mill's breakdown,
not the quite well-known paradox of
egoism, but the much less discussed
paradox of altruism. I'm going to suggest
that this, while not exactly right, points
us in a much more fruitful direction. So
I want to start with a quote from one of
my heroes that unfortunately it's going
to be my responsibility to criticize. So
this is Jackie Robinson saying, "A life is
not important except in the impact it
has on other lives." I believe that is the
quote that is on his gravestone. 
And it's indeed inspirational.
Unfortunately, it threatens to be
incoherent. So here's a distinction
that philosophers like to make between
instrumental value and non-instrumental
or final value. So instrumental value is
the value something has as a means to a
further end, non-instrumental or final
value is not that--the value something
has not instrumentally as a means to
something else, but as an end in itself.
And a natural way to read the suggestion
in Robinson's
remark is that the value of what
we do, the value of everything we do, is
really--the importance of everything we
do is really instrumental. Its value lies
in its effects on the lives of other
people. But then we have to ask, what's
the value of those other lives and the
activities that occupy them? If it too is
merely instrumental, if its value depends
on its effects on the lives of other
people, and the value of those effects
depends in turn on the effects of those
lives on other people, and their value
depends in turn on their effects on other
people, we'll end up with a kind of
perpetual deferral of value, in which
nothing really matters at all. This is
something that Aristotle worries about
or notes as a problem at the very
beginning of his Nicomachean Ethics,
which I'm going to come back to later on.
He says, if the explanation of value were
always in this way instrumental,
"the process would go on to infinity so
that desire would be empty and vain".
Another way to put this is, it's only if
human life matters in itself, apart from
its effects on others, that there's any
point in altruism. There's value in
acting on behalf of others only if
there's value in other non-altruistic
activities too. If altruism is the only
thing that matters, then nothing matters.
Life is not worth living. To put it more
succinctly, here's a quip attributed to W. H.
Auden: "The poet is capable of every
conceit but that of the social worker:
'We are all here on earth to help others:
what on earth the others are here for, I
don't know.'" So it's not a crazy thought
that Mill's development had been warped
by a kind of self-denial that left him
with sort of little real conception of
the positive goals of altruistic
endeavor, that he really was the social
worker to Auden's poet. Now I think this
is pointing us in a fruitful direction. I
don't think it's exactly right, and I'm
gonna try to get a bit clearer about why.
It's not exactly right because I don't
think there's any reason to suppose that
Mill ever had doubts about the
non-instrumental value of meeting human
needs, the sort of aim of social reform. I
don't think there was any point at which
he thought reducing suffering was only
valuable if it had some further effect.
He thought of that as an end in itself,
as having final value.
He was never in the in the position of
the executive in this New Yorker cartoon
who asked, "Granted it would save countless
lives--but to what end?"
So I don't think Mill was ever quite in
that bad a position. But I think there is
still something in this idea of a
paradox of altruism, in the idea that
Mill's obsessive attention to social
reform left a void in his conception of
happiness. And that in fact is what Mill
himself came to believe. So what I want
to do is turn an eye to what he
calls 'the second great reversal' in his
thinking. A diagnosis of his breakdown
that sounds a quiet, unmarked echo of
Aristotle. What Mill calls the other
important change, the second sort of
great change in his opinions, was that, as
he puts it, "For the first time, I
gave its proper place among the prime
necessities of human well-being to the
internal culture of the individual." And
he meant by that the expression and
refinement of human feelings in the
appreciation of art. Now, people
occasionally make fun of the aesthetic
merits of Mill's own writing. His fellow
Victorian Thomas Carlyle, to whom Mill in
fact credits the the paradox of egoism,
wrote to a friend in 1872 and said,
"You have lost nothing by missing the
autobiography of Mill. I have never read
a more uninteresting book; the
autobiography of a steam engine." And I
have to say I think that is a
little harsh.
I actually think, at least in the chapter
where he's talking about his nervous
breakdown,
Mill's account of what happened to him is
both philosophically interesting and
quite moving. Here is a description that
he gives two years after his
breakdown of reading the poetry of
William Wordsworth. He says, "What made
Wordsworth's poems a
medicine for my state of mind, was that
they expressed not mere outward beauty
but states of feeling and a thought
colored by feeling under the excitement
of beauty. They seemed to be the very
culture of the feelings, which I was in
quest of. In them, I seem to draw from a
source of inward joy, of sympathetic and
imaginative pleasure, which could be
shared in by all human beings, which had
no connection with struggle or
imperfection, but will be made richer by
every improvement in the physical or
social condition of mankind. From them, I
seem to learn what would be the
perennial sources of happiness when all
the greater evils of life shall have
been removed, and I felt myself at once
better and happier as I came under their
influence." He goes on: "There have
certainly been, even in our own age,
greater poets than Wordsworth; but poetry
of deeper and loftier feeling could not
have done for me at that time what his
did. I needed to be made to feel that
there was real permanent happiness in
tranquil contemplation." So the question I
wanted to address here is what exactly
was it that Mill learned, or thought he
had learned, about the value of art, and
what does it tell us about the value of
philosophy, and about the value of public
philosophy in particular. To make
progress with this question we're going
to go back further in history to
Aristotle, the great champion of tranquil
contemplation. So a very sort of puzzling
fact about Aristotle's Nicomachean
Ethics is this. This is the main
treatise in ethics that if you take an
undergrad ethics course or a history of
ethics course or a course on Aristotle
you will read. The Nicomachean Ethics
spends nine books--it's sort of divided into
chapters called books--nine books on the
practical virtues, so courage, temperance,
justice. There's a long discussion of
friendship. The idea of practical wisdom
is central. And then in book 10 Aristotle
suddenly turns around and demeans the
practical life in favor of the life of
pure intellect. He says at best that the
life of practical virtue is sort of a
second-rate thing. It's sort of
number two on the list of good lives. 
But number one
is the life of theoretical virtue, of
pure intellect. What is going on? Why does
Aristotle say that? And the interesting
thing to me is how closely
Aristotle's reasons for disaffection
with the life of practical virtue, which
he thinks of as the life of a--ideally
the life of a statesman, a kind of
political life--how closely his reasons
for disaffection with that match the
reasons given by Mill for his turn to the
culture of the feelings. So here's what
Aristotle says, and if you dislike Mill's
prose, Aristotle's prose from lecture
notes in translation is even worse. But
anyway, here goes: "Now the activity of the
practical virtues is exhibited in
political or military affairs, but the
actions concerned with these seem to be
unleisurely: Warlike actions are
completely so (for no one chooses to be at
war, or provokes a war, for the sake of being
at war; anyone would seem absolutely
murderous if he were to make enemies of
his friends in order to bring about
battle and slaughter); but the action of
the statesman is also unleisurely, and
aims--beyond the political action itself--
at despotic power and honors, or at all
events happiness, for him and his fellow
citizens--a happiness different from
political action, and evidently sought as
being different."
So, like Mill, Aristotle is concerned that
the activities of practical virtue, the
political life, fighting wars, engaging in
social reform maybe, are sustained by
struggle and privation. Their value
depends on the existence of problems or
difficulties or needs or injustice, which
these activities aim to address or solve
in some way. And in a way, you think, in an
ideal world there would be no use for
them. That's why, as Aristotle says, it
will be completely crazy to make enemies
of friends in order to create the
opportunities to have a courageous life
of courage and battle. That would
be nuts.
It'll be like Mills saying, "you know, I
hope people suffer, so there's work for
reformers like me." It'd be insane.
Ideally, he will be out of a job. Now this
is quite consistent with thinking--and
Aristotle, I think, is quite clear that--
the achievements of the political life
have final, non-instrumental value. He
says that "the activities of the
statesman are desirable both in themselves"--
this is the bottom of the quote--"and for
the sake of another thing, a happiness
different from political action, and
evidently sought as being different." The
problem with them, for Aristotle, is that
they're not, as he puts it, final without
qualification. And so they do not make
for the best or ideal life. So if you
thought the last quote from Aristotle,
the one that's up there, was bad, this
one's worse. So I'm gonna spend a little
bit of time kind of unpacking this. But
this is the the classic Aristotelian
word-salad. Okay. "Now we call that which
is in itself worthy of pursuit more
final than that which is worthy of
pursuit for the sake of something else,
and that which is never desirable for
the sake of something else more final
than the things that are desirable both
in themselves and for the sake of that
other thing, and therefore we call final
without qualification"--this is the best
kind of thing--"that which is always
desirable in itself and never for the
sake of something else.
Contemplation alone would seem to be
loved for its own sake. For nothing
arises from it apart from the
contemplating, while from the practical
activities we gain more or less apart
from the action." So I'm now going to try
and sort of explain what what is going
on in this passage, what's puzzling about
it, and how to make progress with the
puzzle. So this is going to be a kind of--
this is the most technical bit of the
talk, and it's going to involve some kind
of inside baseball, where I'm going to
raise some questions that ancient
philosophers in the room may be able to
help me with. Mostly what I'm going to
suggest is that it's a bit hard to
understand what Aristotle is saying, it
doesn't seem to quite work, but there's
an insight there that I'm going to
extract from it. So the thing you need to
focus on, I hope, is the moral I'm
going to draw from this rather
difficult passage. So the context of this
passage is Aristotle trying to identify
the highest good. What's the best human
life.
It comes before the famous function
argument, where he says the best life is
one of performing the human function,
reason, etc. etc. In this passage he's
using the idea of finality or being
final without qualification as a
criterion to identify what the best life
would be, or what the best goods in human
life are. And his idea is, well, some
things are worth choosing only as means,
they have merely instrumental value. But
among the things that have
non-instrumental value, they're worth
choosing for their own sake, there's sort
of two categories. The ones that are also
worth choosing for the sake of something
else, and then the ones that are not
worth choosing for the sake of anything
else at all. And the highest good has to
be in that last category. It's got to be
final without qualification. It's got to
be worth choosing only for its own sake,
not for the sake of anything else. And
that's what contemplation is supposed to
be like. And there's a real puzzle there.
The puzzle is, why is Aristotle
thinking that the best goods in human
life, the best human life, the best
activities, are ones that are, as it were,
valuable but useless--sort of good in
themselves, but not for the sake of
anything else. That seems really weird. In
Plato's Republic, Glaucon suggests that,
you know, the best things in life will be
the ones that are both good in
themselves and also have really good
effects, really useful. 
Seems more sensible. One way in
which you might try to figure out what
Aristotle is getting at here is by
suggesting that when he talks about one
thing being valuable for the sake of
something else, he's not just thinking
about instrumental value being a means
to something else. He's talking about
derivative value; where it gets its value
from. So sometimes an activity that is of
non-instrumental value gets its value
from something else. So its value
is partly explained by something else.
So maybe the value of composing music is
partly explained by the value of
listening to music. If you want to
understand why composing music is
valuable
you'd have to mention something about
the value of listening to music. But
that's not to say that the value of
composing music is purely instrumental,
that its value is exhausted by its
contribution to future listening.
So maybe Aristotle's idea is the best
thing in human life has to have a kind
of absolutely non-derivative value. It's
got to be valuable, but not be sort of
deriving its value from anything else,
because wouldn't the other thing somehow
be be better. But I'm not really
convinced that that's right, that the
ideal life would be one of activities
whose value is totally non-derivative.
After all, the example of composing music
suggests otherwise, at least to me. The
fact that the value of composing music
is partly derivative, partly understood
in terms of the value of listening to
music, doesn't seem to me a good reason
to conclude that the best life would not
involve composing music but merely
listening to it. That doesn't seem right
to me. So I don't really see why non-derivative
 value is thereby somehow
better or makes for an ideal life.
There's a kind of mistake in the
vicinity that it's tempting to make,
which is the mistake of thinking that if
something's value is derivative, the
value of B is derivative from A, adding B
can't add anything to the value of A. And
I think that's true when it when we have
instrumental value. I think you don't add
anything to the value of an end by
pursuing it by ever more elaborate means.
That's like the the Rube Goldberg
fallacy, that you somehow--you know, you
could make the end better by elaborate
circumlocutions in how you bring it
about. That doesn't seem right.
But I think that's specific to instrumental
value. In other cases I don't see why
something whose value is derivative
can't add to the value of the activities
that it derives its value from, or that
its value is partly explained in terms
of. But it's not even clear to me why the
best life couldn't be one of activities
whose value or all of whose--sorry,
entirely of activities whose value is in
that way derivative. Why not? So in the
end I don't really quite understand why
Aristotle thinks that the best life is
one that's got to be--the best good is
one that's final without qualification.
So what I'm gonna do is that annoying
thing when a philosopher says, "what
Aristotle is trying to say"--I remember
one of my--my only ever encounter with
the great philosopher, Elizabeth Anscombe,
was when she talked about teaching a
class in the US and--teaching a class on
Plato, and one of her students saying, "I
think what Plato is trying to say"--and
she interrupted to say, "if Plato was
trying to say something, he would have
said it." So I--with with due respect to
Anscombe, I'm going to suggest that what
Aristotle was trying to say could be
expressed in terms of a distinction that
uses--that I'm going to draw between what
I call ameliorative and existential
value. So ameliorative value is the thing
that it's easiest to get your head
around. The thought is for Aristotle, the
value of political action is
ameliorative. It's the value of a kind of
double negative. It takes something bad,
injustice, suffering, war, and extinguishes
it. It ameliorates. Like social work and
political reform for Mill, its purpose
turns on and depends essentially on
struggle or imperfection. It depends on
conditions that we'd rather do without.
Philosophers don't have a standard term
for that. They also don't have a standard
term for sort of the opposite,
non-ameliorative value, which is that sort of,
the triple negative. So not merely such
as to take away something bad. So I'm
gonna give it a name. This is what I'm
gonna call existential value.
Existential value is just non-instrumental
value that's not ameliorative. So it's
value in activities that doesn't turn on
needs we would be better off without,
regrettable human needs. So I think for
Aristotle and for Mill, the key to the
value of contemplation is that it's
non-ameliorative. It's existential. It doesn't
respond to trouble or imperfection, to
suffering and strife. It is in a way
gloriously redundant. It's not something
we need to do in order to prevent
injustice or harm. It's something that
will be worth doing even in an ideal
world where we didn't have problems
like that to solve. So I think Aristotle's
mistake in the these passages was to
equate existential value with being
final without qualification. And he's on
to something there, because ameliorative
value is always derivative; it does
always derive its value from a certain--
the value of something else, namely the
the disvalue of the bad conditions that
it aims to ameliorate. His mistake, I
think, is that the converse doesn't
hold. Derivative value can also be
non-ameliorative. Anyway, I think it's the
distinction between ameliorative and
existential value that really matters.
Now, Mill doesn't explicitly refer to
Aristotle in the his discussion of
Wordsworth--reading Wordsworth, although
as I said his talk about tranquil
contemplation and freedom from struggle
and imperfection really resonates with
Aristotle. And Mill surely read the
Nicomachean Ethics, most likely he
read it in Greek at the age of 10. So I
think the question that he was worried
about, how would you feel if your reforms
were instantly realized, the question
that left him feeling empty, precisely
evokes this contrast between
ameliorative value and the positive
worth of contemplation. The thought is if
injustice could be eradicated, if human
suffering was dissolved, if everyone had
a kind of sufficiency to live with, what
would be left for us to do? And before
his nervous breakdown Mill had no clear
conception of what that would be. So
although he was engaging in activities
that had non-instrumental value, they
were all addressed to regrettable human
needs. He didn't have a picture of the
positive value in human life. And that's
why poetry was so important to him. If
you go back to the passage where he
talks about Wordsworth, what's crucial is
that Wordsworth's poetry provided him with
a source of inward joy, which "had no
connection with struggle or imperfection".
His pleasures are not those of sort of
hardship overcome; they are, as he puts it,
"perennial sources of happiness" and will
be perennial sources of happiness "when
all the greater evils of life shall have
been removed." So the thought is the problem
with Mill's earlier life was that he
didn't have
picture in it of what's worth doing,
except to reduce the scale of human
suffering. And if the best we can hope
for is not to suffer, to live a life
that's not positively bad, why bother to
live life at all? Better, or just as good,
not to be born. So what are these
important activities that have
existential non-ameliorative value?
Aristotle and Mill both suggest
contemplation, though they seem to mean
very different things by it. So as I
understand it, Aristotelian contemplation
is something like an exercise of
understanding that's possible once
you've completed scientific inquiry and
you can look at the sort of system of
nature and God as the cause of
everything, and understand how it all
fits together.
It's reflection on the structure of the
cosmos and its final causes. Mill by
contemplation means poetic appreciation,
more generally the appreciation of art.
But I'm thinking that in this category
of activities that have existential, not
ameliorative, value we should also place
philosophy and art, but also the kinds of
things that make our days bearable or at
least--or hopefully better than bearable.
So telling funny stories, listening to
music,
swimming or sailing, cooking, playing
games with family and friends,
what the philosopher Zena Hitz has
called, in a discussion that I find very
helpful, the little human things. Now in
philosophy, the kinds of projects that
philosophers pursue that have
existential value, if they have any value
at all, which I believe they do and will
suggest in a minute,
often projects in metaphysics about the
nature of objects or properties or
fundamental ontology, what exists, have a
kind of existential value. Their point is
not to solve a problem; it's to
understand more deeply how the world
works. The same is true of many questions
in the philosophy of mind and language.
Think of the paradox of the heap, the sorites
paradox, or think of philosophers who
engage with inductive skepticism,
wondering how do I even know the sun
will rise tomorrow? I think, for the most
part, they're not well understood as
addressing the practical problem of
whether I should get up tomorrow morning.
They're addressed to questions in the
foundations of human knowledge. The same
is true of many kinds of questions that
get addressed in the philosophy of
science, in aesthetics, and in the less
applied parts of ethics and moral
philosophy. All of them are, I think,
potentially, sources of inward joy,
unconnected with struggle and
imperfection; things that could be
perennial sources of happiness when all
the greater evils of life shall have
been removed. Okay. So I want to finally
sort of bring this all back to the
question of activism and non-activist
public philosophy. So what I've been
suggesting is that there's this important
distinction that is not often
articulated, between ameliorative and
existential value, and that we should
recognize activities that have
existential value. We should acknowledge
that that's a central kind of value that
much philosophical reflection has, along
with the little human things like
telling jokes and listening to music and
hanging out with friends. Now, 
I think the challenge that I haven't really
yet addressed, and that I now want to sort of
bring into focus is in effect the
question, well, so what?
The idea of existential value is the
idea of activities that would still be
worth pursuing
even in an ideal world; they don't just
solve problems. But we're not living in
an ideal world. So maybe it's true that
if we were, we'd sit around doing
non-activist philosophy. We would, you know,
spend our time listening to music,
telling jokes, and hanging out with
friends. What does that have to do with
us in our actual conditions, in a world
with human and political crises? In
circumstances like these, shouldn't
amelioration take precedence? And in a
way isn't that what Mill should have
thought? Shouldn't
Mill have said, well, yes, it's
intellectually important for me to
recognize that reading poetry has
existential value. But that will be what
people do when we've solved all the
problems of the world. My life will be
devoted solely and purely to
amelioration. Why wasn't that the right
response for Mill? Now, Aristotle takes
apparently the opposite line. So Aristotle
associates existential value, what I'm
calling existential value, with the life
of the gods, who don't have any need to
ameliorate anything, and suggests, "we must
not follow those who advise us, being men,
to think of human things, and being
mortals, of mortal things, but must, so far
as we can, make ourselves immortal, and
strain every nerve to live in accordance
with the best thing in us; for even if it
be small in bulk, much more does it in
power and worth surpass everything." So
Aristotle's suggestion seems to be, well,
once you realize the special value of
philosophy, or anything that has
existential value, it should take
priority in your life; forget activism.
But we may be much less sure about that.
There's a kind of question that I and my
colleagues find ourselves asking often,
at least sometimes--sometimes in public,
perhaps often in the privacy of our own
homes. Namely, how can I sit around
thinking about the nature of grounding
or interpreting Leibniz
at a time like this? Aren't there more
urgent political demands that I should
be devoting my energy to? If I can engage
in activists philosophy, shouldn't I?
Isn't that the priority right now? So I
think that is a kind of common refrain, a
kind of inner anxiety, that many
philosophers are struggling with, and
that I want to talk about. I want to do
so in sort of two ways. One is by talking
about grounds for doubt about
philosophical activism, or maybe, putting
this more neutrally, questions about
philosophical activism that I think are
not sufficiently addressed
often by those who engage in it. But I
also want to make a defense of public
philosophy, and of philosophy in general,
that is not overtly activist. So let me
talk first about sort of questions about
activist philosophy that I think
philosophers should pay more attention
to. I just want to start by backing up
and saying, there's a kind of background
question here about whether and to what
extent philosophers have social
responsibilities as such--
responsibilities that go beyond those
that citizens have in general. And it's
not clear to me that philosophers as
such do have those kinds of further
responsibilities. If philosophers work on
the metaphysics of composition or basic
epistemology, it's not clear to me that
they have social response--that there's
anything wrong with that or that they
have any kinds of social
responsibilities that go beyond those of
mathematicians or physicists. Maybe there
are responsibilities that come with
being a member of the Academy, for
being a professor, but not specifically
with being a philosopher. Well what about
humanists? What about moral and
political philosophers in particular? And
arguably there I think yes; there are
sort of obligations that fall on moral
and political philosophers to address
issues of urgent public interest. But
they're sort of collective obligations.
And there's a question of
collective action that needs to be
addressed. So in a way I think
collectively philosophers should devote
attention to these questions. The field
should direct energy to them. But it's
not the case that every one of us, every
philosopher who works on moral and
political philosophy should be focused
on the more applied parts of moral and
political philosophy. There's a question
of how exactly this collective action
problem gets resolved in the field, but I
don't think individual philosophers
should feel an obligation to work on
activist topics. The second thing, or
maybe the more important thing to say
about activist philosophy--and this
really--it's going to come across as one
of those rhetorical questions that is
really just a
a snipe, but it's a genuine question. I
mean, the question that I feel like we
need to think more about is, if the goal
of a certain kind of public philosophy,
activist philosophy, is to work for
social and political change, is it
actually an effective means? Why not
engage in other forms of non-academic
activism? Why not just be an activist? Why
be an activist philosopher? And I think
that is a difficult and serious question
for philosophy. As they say in operations
research around MIT, what is your theory
of change? Now,
Diogenes seemed to have a theory.
Diogenes had the theory, don't write
arguments; enact the life you think
people should live in public. Show them
how it's done. Live in a barrel. Don't
live in a house. Flout convention. Walk
around with a lamp looking for an honest
man in Athens. Confront others with their
complacency in ways they can't ignore.
Activists philosophy on that model would
look a lot more like Occupy Wall Street
than a New York Times op-ed about Occupy
Wall Street. So I think there's a real
risk here of fooling ourselves into
thinking we're making a difference when
we're actually not, and there's a risk of
neglecting, in the process, what is
special about philosophy and what it can
do that other disciplines and other
means cannot effectively do. I want to
reiterate, I don't mean to be pessimistic
or making a case against activist
philosophy. I think it's hard to predict
its effects; often they're surprising and
often the thought, well, I'll just try
this and see what happens, is a perfectly
reasonable one. But I do think the
question is worth raising. I'm gonna talk
briefly about myself. So I said earlier
on that I've been thinking about the
ethics of climate change. That's an area
where the potential--it is a
topic of urgent--perhaps in some 
ways the most urgent topic of
public interest. But when I've tried to
work on it in a more outward-looking way,
what I find is that there's a very
painful disconnect between the really
interesting deep questions in population
ethics or about future generations or
about climate justice that attract me as
a philosopher, and the actual political
problems that need to be addressed to
make a difference. What really matters is
how can we enact meaningful policies in
the face of the wealth and influence of
fossil fuel corporations, both in
government and in institutions like MIT,
where I work. The kind of philosophy I do
isn't really directed at those kinds of
practical political questions. So I've
sort of fudged it a little bit, I have a
kind of compromise, which is, what I've
been doing is teaching the ethics of
climate change at MIT, in the hope that I
will be reaching this audience of
students, and maybe 
they'll do something about it.
And--this points to a kind of aside
that I think is important about public
philosophy, which is the sort of funny,
liminal status of teaching as a domain
of public philosophy, because in a sense
the most regular, attentive or--I shouldn't say attentive,
they're supposed to be attentive--
non-academic audience I have is students.
So I'm often doing philosophy with
non-academic philosophers in class. So
that's one kind of venue in which
there's room for a certain kind of
activist public philosophy. But I should
say, even there I have a lot of anxieties
or reservations about it. There's a
kind of tension that--this could be the
topic of a whole talk, I'm just going to
mention it--but there's a kind of tension
between the professional obligations or
the professional--how one ought to teach
philosophy, the kinds of open-minded and
non-prejudiced ways in which one ought
to introduce philosophical questions, and
the kind of activist call of directing
people towards, directing your students
towards certain conclusions.
I think that is a very
difficult kind of thing to work out, and
it places limits at least on how
comfortable I am being an activist
philosopher in my teaching.
Brief--I've--I have time for a brief
digression, anecdote. When Peter
Singer was hired at Princeton there was
an outcry about his views about
euthanasia. And I felt like on grounds
of academic freedom he should not be--
there should not be a reason for
Princeton not to hire him. There was a
different issue that really didn't get
much discussed that I thought was at
least interesting, namely that he adheres
to a kind of utilitarianism on which one
should only tell the truth insofar as
that will maximize utility, and one
should be willing to not tell the truth
when you think that doing so will
maximize utility, roughly speaking. And he
was going to come to Princeton with the
express aim of having an impact on
future generations of students who would
make a difference in the world. And I
thought the interesting question here is
less to do with his particular views
about euthanasia, the issue is about--the
thing I wanted to think about was the
question of how to square his views
about--in moral philosophy with the kind
of obligations and role of teaching
philosophy in the way I think one ought
to. So that's just a case where, to me
 this question of how far it's okay
to be an activist in one's teaching sort
of came into view. And I've been haunted
by it since then. So that's--that's--
that's about me. Okay. Back to the
challenge. So the challenge is, okay, these
are times of--in many ways times of
political and human crisis. How can we
focus on the existential value of
philosophy in this kind of crisis?
There's sort of two kinds of answers you
might give. One is just, well, I have a
prerogative to, I have a right to live my
life in my own way, I'm not 
obligated to spend my time producing the
greatest happiness of the
greatest number, I don't think
utilitarianism is true, so get off my
back. But there's also a kind of anxiety
or question that's not addressed by just
saying, well, I have the right to do what
I want with my life--
which is, are there good reasons to focus
on philosophy that has this kind of
existential value, this less applied kind
of role, and how strong are those reasons.
I think part of the reason why that
question can seem so nagging for
philosophers like me has to do with a
kind of tendency to think initially of
that question in individual rather than
collective terms. For me, the answer to
that question, why focus on, why do
philosophy of this non-activist kind, and
why share it with a wider public, comes
into better view when I think of it in
social terms or collective terms. When I
think, collectively should there be, does
there need to be, how important is it
that philosophy in its non-applied forms
continue to exist. What would a future be
like in which the existential value of
philosophy, doing philosophy out of
curiosity, not in order to solve problems,
was somehow forgotten, was no longer
something that there was support for or
the possibility for. A future in which no
one works on the existence of numbers, or
why there's something rather than
nothing, or how can we know anything at
all. And I think that future is a very
dismal one, in which the the
potentialities of human life and the
possibilities of human flourishing have
been gravely diminished. Now, philosophers
are prone to overstate how bad that is.
You will find philosophers--not to diss
Socrates again--saying, the unexamined
life is not worth living. Suggesting that
life without philosophy would not just
be missing something, but that no one's
life, no one would be capable of
flourishing at all--and, in fact, my hero
Diogenes said something similar. He said,
"To one who said 'I'm ill-suited to
philosophy,' he replied, 'Then why live at
all, if you have no interest in living
well?'... to manage our lives properly,
we need either reason or a rope." And I--
that I think is an overstatement.
[Audience laughs]
I think philosophy can be an important
part of human flourishing, I don't think
it's essential to it. I think--here's my
other hero, Iris Murdoch, insisting
that a fact that philosophers tend to
forget is the fact that an unexamined
life can be virtuous. But again, I think--
what's illuminating, I think, is to
frame this collectively and individually.
So it's true for individuals that an
unexamined life can be virtuous. But
collectively we have to ensure the
survival of philosophy in its
non-applied, existential forms. We need there
to be philosophers. There should be
philosophers, even though, as in all kinds
of collective action problems, it will
often seem unclear whether you're the
right person for the job.
It will often seem hard to know whether
your decision to pursue philosophy in a
non-applied way is really for the best.
That's an interesting puzzle in moral
philosophy. In this respect, philosophy is
really no different, I think, from the
arts in general. It's equally continuous
with the little human things, like
stand-up comedy or pop music. And in saying
that I'm not implying, I don't mean to be
suggesting that philosophy should just
be for entertainment--I also don't mean
to be saying anything about the relative
significance of philosophy as compared
with stand-up comedy or pop music. I
will leave you to reach those judgments
on your own. But I do think philosophy
has the same kind of value they have. We
need there to be stand-up comedians and
musicians, even if, in any given case, it's
not clear whether you need to be a
stand-up comedian or a musician. I also
think it's helpful to think of
philosophy in that kind of constellation,
in order to remind ourselves that it
really should be entertaining or at
least edifying.
I think another source of resistance to
non-activist philosophy is, in fact, a
kind of tacit
condescension; kind of--takes two forms, I
think. One is hostility to fun, which
philosophers seem to have adopted. But
also a kind of condescension that
suggests that--doubts about whether a
wide audience want to read challenging
and uncomfortable philosophical
reflection of a kind that's about the
meaning of life or the possibility of
knowledge or how many grains of sand
it takes to make a heap. It's useful here
to go back, in closing, to the pedagogical
context; the context--a context in which
whatever kinds of opinions we might be
trying to inculcate in students or
refusing to inculcate in students, one
thing I think we should and can be doing
is sharing the value of philosophy with
students along with the history of
philosophy, skills of critical thinking,
and perhaps in some ways tools or
strategies of activism. I think if we
rightly want students to love philosophy,
we should want them to go on engaging
with it.
My wife is an English professor, and one
thing she said is that one of her goals,
long-term goals, when she teaches
students, is to make them into better
and more committed readers of fiction.
That they should--her goal is, after the class,
they should go on reading. And I thought,
hmm, what would that kind of goal look
like in philosophy?
What would they read? There's only so
much Plato they can go back to. If we
want students, if we want a wider public
to read philosophy and to see the value
of philosophy, we need there, collectively--
we need collectively to provide
good public philosophy for them to
engage with. Now this is a task in which
non-academic philosophers can help. There
are non-academics who are writing
philosophy for wider audiences in quite
wonderful ways. There's Catherine Schultz at
the New Yorker, there's Oliver Berkman, there's
Jim Holt. But I think philosophers need
to pull their weight in this kind of
project.
Philosophers need to sort of solve the
collective-action problem of producing
non-activist public philosophy 
for as wide an
audience as we can reach. Not everyone
needs to do it--
as with all collective action cases, it
doesn't need everyone. But it does need a
sufficiency of philosophers doing this
kind of work, so the public is not left
with Sam Harris or, worse, Jordan Peterson.
Now at this point, in fact, the line
between existential and activist public
philosophy starts to blur, because there
is an activist point in the end to
public philosophy that focuses on
addressing questions that are not
directly applied--focuses on its
existential value. Namely that it's a way
of inviting people to see, hoping that an
audience will come to see, the value of
philosophy, and why it's worthy of our
collective support. Here's a final
passage, quote from Diogenes. He said, "When
asked why people give to beggars but not
to philosophers, he replied, "Because they
expect that they may become lame and
blind, but never that they'll become
philosophers.'" And I think one role for
public philosophy is to try to change
that. Sharing the existential value of
philosophy is a way of working for
social and political change or, to be 
more realistic, let's hope for at least stasis,
in the precarious place of philosophy in
the Academy, in public and private
universities. And in that way, this kind
of public philosophy speaks to an
existential challenge for philosophy
itself. Thank you.
[Audience applauds]
I'm gonna take the mic off.
Hopkins: Thank you, Kieran, for that wonderful lecture.
So there's plenty of time for questions.
We have two microphones, many people in
the audience, it's over to you people, time to do some philosophizing yourselves.
Setiya: It's at least your chance to
become a philosopher.
Man 1: Just on the  distinction between
ameliorative and existential value.
There's a way of hearing, you know, what you're saying. 
So these are two fundamentally different sources of
value. I was wondering about the idea that 
amelioration itself can have existential
value. I mean, after all, those things,
those activities you say have
existential values, whether it's thinking, or curiosity or 
pottering about and so on--I mean, it's reasonably
plausible that, you know, helping others
is one of those things that has not only
ameliorative value but existential value.
There's value--you know, non-derivative
value, it may have derivative value from
the value it gets from--that accrues to
other people, but perhaps it also has
existential value; non-derivative value in its own
right. I mean, that--a strong version of this
might say, the only
source of existential value is
amelioration. And maybe that would
provide a way of making sense of
Aristotle's paradox of egoism without
the virtue of the--you know, the value being 
fundamentally relational. But I was wondering also
whether it might have--that idea might have some
application to the case of philosophical
activism, and maybe in ameliorating some
of your, say, discomfort. I mean, it's not
obvious to me that everyone who favors
public--ameliorative public philosophy is
doing so simply in virtue of the good
effects they think it's gonna have on
others. As you say, I think that it's
often gonna be fully questionable
whether it's having those effects. I
think perhaps it's viewed simply as one
of those activities that has a certain--
certain kind of existential value,
and it's good in itself, let's say, that philosophers are 
doing this. I don't know if that view ends up being
coherent, but at least I'm wondering how that perspective fits into what you're saying.
Setiya: No, that's interesting. So I--so
one thing to say is I was thinking that
we shouldn't equate non-derivative value
with existential value, because there'll
be existential value that is derivative.
So I explicitly want to allow for that.
And the other thing I think you're right
about, that
I wanna agree, is that often there are
exercises of doing philosophy in private
or public that have both kinds of value.
They're in some way addressed at solving
some regretable need, and even if there
weren't that need there would be some
other aspect of them that would still be
valuable. I think the other issue you're
raising is about the sort of
difficulty or kind of--I think of it as a
feature not a bug, of the distinction
between ameliorative and existential
values--the idea of ameliorative value
is not just that it answers a need, but
it answers a need we'd rather not have
to face. So the thought is, in an ideal
world we wouldn't need to do that. And
one thing you might say is, well, there
are activities like--various kinds of, say,
grieving. You might think, well, grieving
is a response to something bad, kind of--
someone dying. But it's not clear
that it's a response to something bad
that we'd rather do without. It might be
that we end up thinking, rightly, that
this is one of those bad things that
we're better off with. So the idea of
needs that are not needs--regrettable. The
idea of human needs that we'd rather
have than not have is one that will put
things that you might have thought were
merely ameliorative value into
the category of things that have
existential value. Also you might think
the human need for comfort or company, you
might think, that's not a regrettable
human need. It's not, like, ideally we
would all go off and live isolated,
hermit-like lives because we wouldn't
need anyone else. But there's just--I
think there's just gonna be a substantive
debate with respect to given human needs
about whether they're regrettable, and
you might find Aristotle saying--I don't know
if this is right about Aristotle, 
but, anyway, you might find some
saying, you know, as it happens, friends
are useful for contemplation. But if we
were gods we could just, we 
could junk 'em. And so that seems to, like--
it's just a substantive question about
whether the relevant needs are
regrettable or not.
Man 2: Mill was miserable, and internally he had
struggle and imperfection under the
principle sort of, like, all life--life is
suffering. So wasn't Wordsworth's poems
less existential than ameliorative for
his own internal struggle and
imperfection?
Setiya: So it's true that for Mill--yeah, I mean, I think this 
is maybe related to David's question. So it
might be that reading words was poetry
was playing more than one role in Mill's
life. So one role is ameliorating a kind
of depression that it would be
better if--we might think ideally he
would never have crashed into the
depression in the way that he did. On the
other hand, it also had a kind of value
that even after that problem had been
solved, it would continue to have. So this
might just be a case, as you, I think--one
way to think about what you're
suggesting is, this is a case where an
activity in relation to Mill both solved
a regrettable need and had a value
 that persisted after that regrettable
need had been addressed.
Man 2: That need is a recurrent need for all people.
Setiya: Well, then I think what--
okay, so there's two issues.
There's the regrettable--
you might think having a nervous
breakdown
is not a thing that all people need to
go through. That's a 
regrettable feature of Mill's life. We
might reasonably hope for a life in
which people don't have the degree of
trauma that Mill went through. On the
other hand, there's the, say, the need for
poetry or the sort of desire for the
kind of, the need--the recurrent need
to engage with art or philosophy or some
source of existential value. But that's
where I would say, if that's how we're
thinking about it, we're not thinking of
this value was ameliorative, because the
needs to which it's responsive are not
regrettable. What we're thinking is,
there's certain kinds of needs that we
don't want to put--that we wouldn't
even in an ideal world wish not to have.
Even an ideal what we'd want to still
need to engage
with poetry. I think that's the thought.
The hard questions that--
that are, I think, raised by Aristotle's
discussions at the end of the
Nicomachean Ethics are whether we should
think that way, or whether we should say,
well, no, ideally, we'd be the kind of
people who who don't need to engage with
any of these activities. We could take it
or leave it. But just, we want to and will.
And whether that would be, as he says--he
thinks, as it were, we should be--we
shouldn't respond to that by saying,
you're describing something inhuman;
that's not a human life you're
describing. Aristotle's suggestion seems to
be, we should, as far as we can, strive to--
we should be pro-immortal. We should
strive to be like the immortals in that
respect. And I think one way to
understand the response you're sort of
putting into view would be the response
that says, no, Aristotle is wrong; we
should cherish aspects of our humanity
that are nevertheless sources of
vulnerability.
Man 3: So in a way I apologize
for this question a bit at the outset, in
the way you apologized for one of your questions,
because I mean it as a serious  question, but it sort of has the feel of snark about it as I articulate it.
And the question, you know, is really that I'm not
sure that I really understand the sort
of foil here, namely philosophical
activism. And I don't really fully
understand it, I think, at both ends. So, 
again, to be a bit autobiographical, what
really drew me to philosophy originally
was really analytic philosophy in its
purest form. And, in part, it was because
one could not do this kind of philosophy
without seeing the world in a seriously
different way. The clarity that it
brought, the rigour of argumentation that
it brought, was, at least for me,
transformative. And I think a lot of
people who work in, let's just call it
analytic practical ethics, think that
they're not doing what activists do in
the sense of
trying to cause people by whatever
means to have some particular set of
views. But whether the issue is abortion
or whether the issue is euthanasia or
whatever it may be, I think a lot of
people simply think that if we think
about these issues clearly and
rigorously and analytically, for many
people this is going to be
transformative of their of their views.
Whereas what activists do, I think, is
extremely important, and
it's a very different thing. So I'm
not really sure sort of what this, if
you'll forgive me for saying, slightly
looming threat of philosophical activism is.
Setiya: I see. So I wasn't thinking of it--I 
really wasn't thinking of it as a threat. I
was just thinking of it as a, as you said,
a foil, like a a thing that is perfectly
legitimate, but shouldn't be the only
thing. So I don't have a--in a way there's
a kind of sociological question here,
which I can only speculate
about, is how much of the kind of work that
people like Peter Singer or Jeff McMahan
or Onora O'Neill, how much of the work
they're doing are they thinking of as
merely
helping people to think more clearly in
a way that it isn't intended to have, and
it would be fine if it didn't have, any
practical upshot. My sense is that that's
not what they're doing, that they think--
they may think it has both kinds of
value, but at least a significant part of
the value they see in writing practical
ethics or making arguments about the
ethics of war is the idea that this will
have an effect. And so I think they
are thinking of what they're doing as
addressing regrettable human needs. I
mean, in a way part of what--I don't want to say
provoked, that makes it--that's too strong,
but part of what prompted me to frame
things in the way I did was
the tendency--I gave that one quote from
David Johnson from the the APA blog. But
it was--it's representative of a kind of
broader tendency, anecdotally, for
philosophers to talk about public
philosophy as if the only thing worthy
of the name is philosophy directed
at issues--public issues of urgent social
and political interest. And on the one
hand, they will often say, well, yeah,
that's just how I'm using the phrase.
They'll sort of back off when you say,
well, what about these other kinds of--
what about many of the columns in the
stone are just about--let's go with the
paradox of the heap again. They're just
about philosophical problems, not about
anything of political urgency, and they
seem to find a readership. And often what
people will do, anecdotally, when you
press them on that is say, well, that's
just not what I'm calling public
philosophy. I think there's a real danger
there, because, in fact, that phrase has
now caught on in a way that gives it a
certain kind of authority. So I think
de facto not counting writing a New York
Times op-ed about the paradox of the
heap as public philosophy, will have--if
that doesn't get counted as public
philosophy, it will be in effect a kind
of devaluing of a certain kind of
outward-facing work that I think is--we're at
risk of--we're at genuine risk of neglecting or
devaluing.
Hopkins: Fight among yourselves.
Woman 1: Go ahead.
Man 4: It sounds as though you're saying that
part of the project of public philosophy
is for people to value doing philosophy 
as they value stand-up comedy and
music. And part of it is for people to
actually engage in it themselves, to
contemplate their own lives. And I
wondered whether both are essential, or
whether public philosophy will have
succeeded if it gets people to value it
but not do it, or to do it but not
understand that they're doing it and not value it.
Setiya: in general I'm a wishy-washy
pluralist. So my answer is going to be,
well, all of those things sound good,
I'm not inclined to say, as some people
maybe might, if what people are doing is
just reading philosophers and thinking,
that was clever, that that isn't really
philosophy, and it's not really of value;
only if the people, the audience are
themselves philosophizing is this of any
value. I don't think--I don't think that's
true. I think it will be fantastic if
what have--it wouldn't be everything but
it would be something quite significant
if there were an audience of
people reading the Stone, who don't go on
to think about the problem themselves
afterwards, but merely think, wow, that was
really enlightening, and gave me
a kind of sense of a dimension of life
that I hadn't previously accessed. 
So I--the main thing I will say is I
don't at all devalue the sort of mere
consumer of philosophy. I think that's a--
it will be a mistake to be the kind of
purist who says that's not really philosophy.
Woman 1: Actually this is directly related, so 
it's good that we're sitting next to each other.
There seems to be
something of an assumption, maybe in what
you just said a bit, and near the end of
your talk as well, that there are some
who do philosophy and some who don't do
philosophy. And that line maybe roughly
tracks those who are professional
philosophers and those who are not
professional philosophers. 
And I wonder about
assumption. In particular, it seems to me
like it's often a good way to get a
student, or, you know, a random wedding
guest you've been seated next to, to
understand the value of what you do, to
get them to see that they already do
something very much like it. And you're
trying to do it maybe more rigorously or
with more attention or something like
that. So maybe another implication of
this phrase, 'public philosophy', maybe
another reason to dislike the phrase
'public philosophy', is that it has an
implication that not everybody is doing
this yet; some people are doing it in
private, but the others can be sort of
brought into the fold if they see what's
being done in private. Anyway I just
wanted to invite you to comment on that.
Setiya: That's really helpful. Yeah, no. I--that
does seem like a--that would be a bad
thing to convey. So I guess I--let me say
explicitly, yeah, I wasn't thinking at all
that philosophy is something that
the pros do, and others don't unless
given the special tutoring of the
professionals. I mean, this quote
that I do like from from Murdoch I think
is on to something. So there is a kind of
very strong claim that people will sometimes--
philosophers will sometimes make,
which is, well, you may think you're not
doing--
everyone is secretly doing philosophy.
And I think that is a--
that is a kind of exaggeration in that I think
many people live perfectly well without
thinking systematically about how to
live in anything like the way
philosophers do, let alone thinking
systematically about any of the other
kinds of philosophical questions. How to
live is the hardest to avoid, and the one
where you're most likely to be reflective.
But even there, I think it's possible to get through life while being pretty unreflective. I don't think
philosophy is sort of unavoidable. But I
definitely don't think the line between
people who are doing it seriously in an
engaged way, and the ones who--the perhaps
minority who are not, is the line between
professional philosophers and others. And
so, yeah, I think that's an interesting
question whether public
philosophy is somehow--that
phrase is somehow giving the wrong
impression.
One way to cancel that would be--one way
to counteract that would be to say, I
contributed
to that impression by talking about
public philosophy mainly from the
perspective of how should philosophers
do it. And I could have said more clearly
throughout, there may be all kinds of
public philosophy going on, in which lost
professional philosophers are not at all
involved, and that's great.
Or that is another valuable
thing. So yeah, I think that's just right.
Man 5: I was curious about this
analogy you made to English classes and
getting students to read fiction outside
of class, and have it be part of their
life. It's not the case that fiction
writers produce certain works of fiction
just for other writers, and then a
separate work of fiction for the public.
And I guess I was curious--you might
think we already produce a ton of public
philosophy, it's just they don't read it. And
so I was curious whether--I mean, I don't
know how to think about this and I was
curious whether you sort of could help
us out here. Why do we need to produce a
sort of special line of this theoretical
philosophy that is, like, specifically
tailored for the public when we already
produce quite a bit of it. 
Setiya: So I feel like there should be a deeper and
more interesting answer to your question
than just that you answered it
yourself, namely, they're not reading it.
So my thought is, if we want them to
read it we have to produce the kinds of
things they want to read.
Man 6: At the beginning of your talk you
commented on the fact that public--there
seems to have been an explosion of
public philosophy lately; more and more
philosophers on op-ed pages and in
newspapers and magazines and so on. And
then at the end of your talk you
mentioned briefly the sort of precarious
position of philosophy within the
Academy, and perhaps the humanities more
generally. And I just wanted to ask you
to say a little more about the
juxtaposition of those two things. And I--
on one level it seems puzzling, why is
philosophy suddenly enjoying this great--
greatly increased public profile at the
same time that its position within
the university seems to be increasingly
precarious. And, you know, one answer might
be, it's a coincidence, or, you know--
and there's even, if I understood you
correctly, there's sort of a--you might
think, well, maybe there's a happy story
where the rise of public philosophy
helps to solve the precariousness of
philosophy by generating more interest
and that trickles down to the
universities. I wonder--sometimes in more
paranoid moments I wonder whether
there's a more sinister story to
tell. That is, somehow the rise of
public philosophy encourages the thought
that philosophers are just more people
with opinions, you know? You just read the
op-ed pages and there'll be, you
know, an article by this person and that
person. Some of them are philosophers, and
they're just more people. They don't have
any--there's nothing special about their
ideas. They're just more--and, you know, the
Internet's full of people with opinions
about this and that. So who needs
philosophers as a profession, as a
discipline? There's nothing really
special about what they're doing, and
that the consequence of that may
actually be to reinforce doubts about
whether academic philosophy is a pursuit
that we need. But that's, you know--that's,
as I say, just in my paranoid moments. I
just wondered whether you have any
thoughts about the juxtaposition of
these two phenomena.
Setiya: So that feels like this sort of two--again, sociological questions that I can only
speculate about. So one is, is there any
causal connection between the genuine
explosion in sort of outward-facing
public philosophy and the sense of
the humanities and philosophy as being
sort of beleaguered in the university.
I--my guess, this is not something I
could provide evidence for, I'm curious,
is that there is a connection in that I
think--and, again, anecdotally--the
outward- facing work is partly a response to the
anxiety that we have failed to
communicate the value of philosophy as
well as we could.
That's certainly something that people
in other humanities say about the
increasing amount of sort of 
outward-facing work in history or in literature.
It's becoming--so it's part of a kind of
story that people are telling themselves.
I think there might 
well be some truth to it.
The second sociological question is
whether it's going to be
counterproductive. So I--again, I don't
really know. One thing--I have an anecdote,
which was that talking to Peter Catapano
about the Stone column, which is
largely--mostly columns written by
professional philosophers, was that he had started--
I think they had originally planned to do it
as a summer kind of series, finite series--
and it was incredibly popular. And so--now,
it may be--which is why it's now a permanent
fixture. So it may be that it was popular
in a way that didn't involve people
forming more positive impressions of
philosophers. I mean--but that
feels to me
maybe excessively paranoid. I think--I
feel like the fact that it was so
popular suggests a certain range of--
still fairly narrow audience
of New York Times accessing online
denizens--felt like there was something
of value that they were getting out of
reading what philosophers were providing.
Maybe that won't ultimately do a lot to
improve people's impressions of
philosophy. But I feel like in that
case in particular I doubt that it's
really gonna hurt. But yeah--I mean, maybe
when I asked about
the effectiveness of activist philosophy
I should have in fact framed it more
broadly. There's sort of
empirical questions that are being
tested on the fly; one is, is writing
about, say, propaganda from a
philosophical viewpoint going to make
a positive difference to how vulnerable
democracies are to propaganda? Well,
that's one kind of thing we might find
out. And there's also a broader question
of how far the project of sort of
writing about philosophy for a wider
audience in a way that purports to sort
of convey its value will, in fact, be
successful. And framed in those
terms, it does just seem like a kind of--
it's another--maybe the worry I had about
activist philosophy, namely, will
this work, I should be having about the
non-activist philosophy too--namely,
it might be effective in making people
value philosophy more, or maybe not. I don't
know. But I guess I'm cautiously
optimistic about it.
Hopkins: So there's a question down here from Jean. And then I see--
Woman 2: Thank you. So it's more
or less drawing on what you
just said. So I absolutely agree with you
on, like, the value of, like, the non-applied, non-activist, non-derivative
value basically of philosophy, the
existential value. And the parallel you
drew between arts and philosophy in that
sense I think makes a lot of sense. But
even if I agree with this non-applied, you know,
value of philosophy, we need to address
really the question, how to apply, you
know, public philosophy in, you know, in a
non-applied way, basically. So how do we
concretely--just, you know--it's not--it's
just a remark. I don't know if you have--
honestly, I was coming to this conference
with a whole other--I am very glad,
this was absolutely great. But just I had
the impression that we would speak more
about maybe means of popularizing
philosophy, which is something I'm sure,
you know, maybe some of us were expecting.
Which is, I mean, a very tough subject as
well, way more applied, again. So basically
what, you know--one of the possibilities
that we could address is also to
create some kind of education
for academic philosophers to actually be
able to popularize philosophy, which is
absolutely not done. And the huge gap
between today the elite of, you know,
professional philosophers and the
rest is actually alarming, despite this
rise of public philosophy
today. And so I think--I don't know if you
have, like, maybe some ideas about,
like, the obstacles to this
possible popularization of philosophy,
making it more accessible to--and I'm
speaking really a wider audience, because you
speak, oh yeah, students are already kind
of a public--no, I mean, students already
privileged kids coming to university.
If we're speaking really about public public
philosophy, we have to face and not
deny the huge diversity of the audiences
we shall face. So yeah, just if you
have a few words about this.
Setiya: I don't--yeah, so I think that's an excellent 
question. So I do think--what seems to be true, this
is a sort of optimistic thought, is
that there's evidence that there are
audiences who will consume public
philosophy of a non-applied kind if
it's presented in forms that are
engaging and interesting. So it
seems like there is an audience for
public-facing work. It's--I think the
thing you're pointing to that's true, and that
I don't have a simple answer to, is it's
not part of philosophical
training in undergrad or grad school or
at any point, really, to learn how to
produce that kind of work. In fact,
writing--one of the things I discovered in
trying to write the midlife book was
how different the editorial voice was
when I was trying to write that book for
my--the editorial voice in my head when I
write for my colleagues is, no, there's
several objections to that. Or do
you mean this or this or this or this.
And the patience for fine-grained
distinctions and elaborate dealing with
objections that I anticipated among the
non-academic audience was close to zero.
And the voice in my head was saying,
where is this going? This is a bit
boring. And so I think that the kinds of
ways of philosophical writing that
philosophers have been trained in are
not conducive to writing for wider
audiences. What's happening now is a lot
of sort of makeshift kind of work,
whereby people who've done a bit of
public philosophy have little workshops
for grad students and other faculty who
think, well, I might like to do that; how
do I do it? So there's a kind of informal
network of people sort of reaching out
to each other and trying to learn how to
do this. So I've sort of--that's been very
helpful to me. Also in learning how to--
how do you submit an op-ed, or
how do you write for--how do you
submit things to non-academic journals.
So I think it's happening informally now.
I think it would be really fantastic if
the idea of doing this and training and
doing it became a more regular part of
graduate education. I think there's a
complementary thing, which is, work that
is outward directed is valued--
I perceive it,
I think it's perceived to be valued very
little by academic colleagues. So there's
an anxiety that people at my career
stage can get away with doing it, because
they don't need to get promoted, but if
you're a junior person in philosophy,
you'd be taking a gamble if you devote
too much of your time to writing for-- 
addressing wider audiences, because
it won't help you get tenure, and you may
not have to get to have a career. I don't
know if that fear is justified, but it's
definitely present, and it's definitely a
deterrent. So another thing that I think
could happen systemically is for
philosophers to talk about the ways in
which this kind of work gets to be
valued in the tenure and promotion
process. I will say, I'm just gonna
mention one, I'm just gonna give a plug. I
think that there are people
who are doing, I think, really inventive
work in public philosophy, that is more
inventive than just, I'll write a book
that's a bit more accessible. And one I
think that is amazingly
successful is Barry Lam's podcast, it's
called Hi-Phi Nation. I'm gonna give a--you
know it already, okay. I'll give a shout out to
that. It's basically a kind of This
American Life for philosophy. It's a
narrative podcast, high production values,
tells a story and weaves in philosophy.
That's really amazing. But he basically
just did that. He figured out how to do
it himself, he scrabbled around for
funding. There was no
infrastructure for it. But it will be--
there is a kind of structural thing
that philosophers need to think about, is
how to make make that kind of project
and more creative projects more feasible.
Thanks.
Man 6: Thank you. Everyone's talking about
public philosophy and--being done in
the setting of--the medium of writing.
Here in New York Massimo Pigliucci, he
does a philosophy meetup at New York
Society of Ethical Culture. I know
there's at least--and they draw anywhere
from 30 to 50 people on a regular basis.
And there's at least five to ten other
meetups that meet up regularly to discuss
philosophy. So I think that part of it is,
is that many people want to discuss
philosophy. They also want to read it, but
they also want to have the
ability to learn from others and discuss
that. So I think that's really important--
and to do so in person. My question for
you is, we've all studied oppressive
environments as far as regimes and
governments, and I'm kind of curious as
this dichotomy of activist
philosophy--in the United States it cost
twenty four hundred dollars to give up
your US citizenship. Does the environment
in which the philosophy occur affect the
type of philosophy that happens within
that environment, and does inadvertently
activist philosophy somehow create a
feedback loop that then can go ahead and
make environments so that they're more
oppressive, or that one type of
philosophy gets pushed out over another.
Setiya: Could you say a bit--I think I didn't totally
get the idea. So the idea is
there's a risk that activist
philosophy will create a feedback loop
that will--what was the thought, that it will
somehow--
Man 6: That it'll create a feedback loop
that increases the strength of an
oppressive environment, that then pushes
out other types of philosophy, and also
individual liberty. 
Setiya: I see. I mean, so--I
mean, there's two levels at which to
think about that. Maybe one is whether
it's going to crowd out other kinds of
philosophical activity, and one of my
concerns was, let's preemptively
avoid the risk that it will crowd out
the kind of philosophy that is addressed
at non-applied issues, that's being done
by the public in public discussions or
by philosophers aimed at a wider
audience. I mean, I think there's nothing
inherent--the second issue is, is
there something about activist
philosophy that will be--that will have
sort of deleterious political effects on
liberty or something. But it's hard to
say--I mean, it's hard to think why that
would be in the abstract without looking
at the content of the activist
philosophy. The activist philosophy could
be, you know, activist libertarian
philosophers arguing for decreased
regulation. So it's--maybe that would be
counterproductive and have the
opposite effect, but it's not
obvious that that by itself--it's
not obvious why that would have negative,
the kind of negative effects
you're worried about.
Man 7: Thanks. So a couple
of thoughts about why we should expect
and maybe even want public philosophy to
be associated with activist philosophy.
So in your first--the naive reading of
Aristotle from the Nicomachean Ethics,
you posed this objection that was, well,
why should we think that, if we're
thinking of this in terms of
instrumental versus, like, intrinsic value,
why should we want something with only
intrinsic value when we could have
something with both intrinsic and
instrumental value. And I wonder if the
same kind of thought can't be reapplied
to your more nuanced reading, which is, so
we've made the distinction between the
existential and the ameliorative, why
wouldn't the best kind of good be one
that is both existential and
ameliorative. That is, if we could find
really interesting philosophical
questions in topics of public interest,
wouldn't that be
extra good, than if we could just find
the existential goods in topics that
aren't of public interest. And so this is,
I guess, a thought of why we might want
activist philosophy to be done in
general. And a further thought is, well, if
activist philosophy is being done at all,
that is, if there are topics of public
interest being looked at philosophically,
then surely that should be shared with
the public, because they're topics of
public interest. And the same is not
really true for all of the other
existential topics in philosophy, because
there might just be some things the
public isn't that interested in. And
so it seems natural that if activist philosophy
is being done, and I think we should want
it to be done, then all or most of it
should be shared with the public. And
that will create a natural association
of the two. 
Setiya: Okay, yeah. Excellent. Thank you.
So I get--feel like there's sort of
two questions there. So one is, is there a
special reason why activist--
philosophy applied to urgent political
issues should go public, in a way that
doesn't apply to other parts of
philosophy. My sense is that it isn't
true that there's an absence of
appetite among people, the public in
general, everyone, enough
people, for non-applied philosophy. I mean,
my sense is--I guess we'll find out when--
if, as I hope, lots more philosophers
write about their philosophical--their non-applied philosophical ideas for a wider
public, whether there's an audience for
it. But my sense from talking to, you know,
editors and agents is, they think there is.
So I am not, you know--while there might
be special reasons for applied work to
be public, I don't think there's
a lack of interest in less applied work.
The other thing you said is, wouldn't it
be--you know, if I can write about, you
know, animal ethics or climate change,
and do work that's both interesting in
itself and also potentially of practical
value, why not have your cake and
eat it? Why not have both? And--but my
sense is that that might be an argument--
again, there's this sort of individual/
ecological perspective shift that I find
helpful. So I can see why that might be a
reason for you, or for any individual, to
think, yeah, this is what I want to do. But
when you think ecologically, it's just
bad if the range of
philosophical work that's being done is too
narrow.
What we want is for there to be a--what's
best is if there's a very wide plurality
of different philosophical projects and
questions being pursued. And I think
there's public interest in a very wide
range of them. So, again, when I was
thinking about--when I kind of
imagined this dystopian future, part of
what I was thinking was, well, suppose
everyone in philosophy focused on
applied topics. What would that mean? It
would mean that in a couple of
generations, the state of the non-applied
parts of philosophy would be problematic,
or at the very least, it would be sort of
surviving as an adjunct to to the
applied projects, because you can't do
them without knowing a bit of
metaphysics or epistemology or whatever
it might be. And that would not be a
kind of happy future for philosophy. So I
think individually that might be a good
argument, but ecologically and
collectively it's not a good
future.
Man 7:  Thanks. So I really 
appreciate the
distinction between activists and 
non-activist public philosophy. I think the
concern about the efficacy of activist
public philosophy can be eased a little
bit by thinking about the forms that
public philosophy can take that aren't
just writing and speaking for a general
audience. So think of, like, the effective
altruist movement. They've organized
themselves pretty, you know, effectively.
You can think of my colleague at
Brooklyn College, works with the
participatory budgeting project. He
thinks of himself as a political
philosopher, doing work directly with
policymakers. Anita Allen talked at the
last APA about, you know,
affecting, like, the Indian Supreme
Court's decision-making about privacy. I
mean, there's ways that people can do
public philosophy through institutional
avenues and in ways--and
collectively through organization that
aren't just, like, writing op-eds and
talking to people. Of course, that stuff
is 100% super valuable. But I
think--
yeah, I think activist public
philosophy can be quite effective
when it takes the right institutional
form. Maybe I'll also add one plug for
the public philosophy network, which is a--
like, a formal national organization that
gets public philosophers together to
share best practices and collaborate
with each other and stuff like that.
Setiya: Thank you. Yeah. So that's very
helpful. So yes I--yes, to everything you
said, basically. I meant to be raising the
question; I didn't mean to suggest that
there aren't good answers to it. And I
think it's very helpful to have in view
some of the ways in which people doing
activist philosophy have have not merely
been writing op-eds or books, but have
been engaging in more sort of hands-on
ways. And that seems really valuable. I
guess there was a--there's a certain
amount of this that I suppose is
directed at the voices in my head, or the
kinds of conversations I have with
colleagues, in which I feel like there's
a kind of--that there is a desire to do
activist philosophy but it doesn't
always come with a sense of the
interactive strategies that you're
describing that would make it effective.
So I think there are people who are
doing that, but there's lots of people in
philosophy who aren't particularly
equipped to do that, or haven't
really thought through how those kinds
of connections would be made, or what it
would take to make their work effective.
So in a way you could take the question
not as a skeptical question, but just as
a suggestion that if you want to do
activist philosophy, it would be good to
think about how you anticipate the kind
of work you're doing making a change,
making a difference, and to think about
whether the kinds of collaborations
you're describing would be a crucial
part of that. So in a way I'm thinking,
if we're gonna do activist philosophy,
let's do it well and effectively, at the
same time as not making that the only
kind of public philosophy there is. But
yeah, that's very helpful.
Hopkins: So here, Kit Fine.
Man 8: There's a story about the Cambridge
mathematician, Hardy. He claimed that the
work he did in number theory, it was of
no practical value. And someone pointed
out the one of his theorems actually did have
an application, and he was dismayed.
[Setiya and audience laugh]
Man 8: And I've always admired him. And it seems to
me that, if you ask what's the cause of
the dismay, he wanted to actually do work
in pure mathematics, for which there was
only a mathematical reason. And he didn't
want there to be some other reason for
doing the work. And he actually thought
there being this other reason detracted--
if we construe his dismay
strongly--detracted from the value of
what he was doing. And if indeed we want
to be like the gods, that's the kind of
attitude we should have.
[Audience laughs]
Setiya: I--I--I--
[Laughs]
Exactly. If indeed--
[Audience laughs]
--we want to be like the gods. 
I mean, there
is a--yeah, I think that there is
something to that, the thought that
Aristotle is channeling there, that it's
something--that one might be at least
ambivalent about the practical value of
one's work insofar as its having
practical value reflects something
regrettable. You wish there weren't any
need for it, and you wish we weren't the
kinds of--there's a perspective from
which I can imagine--I wish we weren't
that kind of creatures who needed
anything but, what is it, pencils and
paper--except--and erasers--and the
philosophers don't need erasers, or
whatever the the joke is. Is that--
philosophers don't need wastebaskets,
yeah. Yeah. No, I think that--I think that--
this brings into view a question I think I
haven't tried to address, but that came
up early on, namely, how to think about
what kinds of human needs are
regrettable, and whether we should share
this sort of Aristotelian perspective
that does seem intelligible to me, on
which every kind of need, every kind of
dependency can come to 
seem like it's regrettable.
Man 8: So most of the time I feel very positive
about public philosophy, and encouraging
both the activist and the non-activist
versions of it, and I'm happy to see an
increasing public profile, in the United
States anyway, for philosophers. But one
of the things that gives me pause is
that there are countries in the world,
they'll remain nameless, some of them in
Western Europe, but also in other parts
of the world, where historically, philosophy of both varieties, activist and non-activist, applied, non-applied,
has historically had a much higher public
profile than here. And that does seem to
go hand-in-hand with the professional
philosophy not being very strong in
those countries. And I've often wondered
whether there is a connection between
the two, whether when you have that much
public consumption of philosophy, it
creates a market for diluted and not necessarily very 
high quality stuff, which ends up then dominating
in certain ways. 
Anyway, just a cautionary observation.
Setiya: That's very
interesting. I mean, so the--it's
tricky to--again, sociological question--
tricky to know how much sort of
university structures and so on are
playing a role in the kinds of
things you're reporting as
sort of weaknesses in the kind of
academic philosophy done in nameless
countries. The--yeah, and I think
there's something to the thought that--
maybe this is a thing I didn't emphasize,
but should have emphasized about the
sort of ecological perspective is,
there's--another kind of risk of valuing
public philosophy would be to think, well,
everyone should be doing this; this is
what philosophy should be. And, in fact, I
think, again, if you think--individually,
you might make a case that you want to
do that and that's fine, but, again,
ecologically, if you're looking at the
sort of health of philosophy, it's really
important that there be, I
think, philosophers doing work for which
they're not at all worried about whether
there will--they're doing it in a way
that will be
intelligible to a wider public. And I
think the health of philosophy
absolutely depends on that. So it
would be terrible if sort of the public
facing stuff came to supplant that kind
of work. And that's one of the things
that I find--the thing I joked about
at the beginning of the talk, namely, the
philosophers who decide that their
 first and most glorious act of
public philosophy is to denounce their
colleagues for writing driveling garbage
that only other philosophers can read. I
think it's just incredibly wrongheaded,
because I think it's crucial to the
health of philosophy that people are
able to explore things at the level of
depth and difficulty that makes it very
hard to make it accessible. And they're
not--while they're doing it, they're not
worried about that.
And that seems--that does seem crucial. I
mean, there's another thing I can't 
resist saying about the sort of--that
I think philosophers get wrong, I
think. That is, again, for me illuminated
by thinking ecologically, which is,
there's a--people often say, there's too
much being published. And, you know, what
should happen is the journals should
just become much more restrictive. And I
think, in any individual case that might
seem like a good move, but if you think
ecologically, we're just not reliable as
a community, we're not reliable enough
at detecting what's of value and will
be of value, for the effects of
somehow, say, halving acceptance rates, to
be anything other than the destruction
of, or the sort of consigning to the
waste bin of, enormous amounts of very
valuable philosophy. So actually if you
look ecologically, it may not be that we've
got the balance perfect, but having
relatively low barriers to publication,
where a lot of stuff gets published, much
of which won't be very important, seems
as a kind of collective strategy not a
bad idea. And that's another case where I
think philosophers maybe don't think
always enough about the discipline as a
kind of sociological phenomenon.
Hopkins: I think  the final question is at 
the back--if you still wish your question.
Woman 3: Thanks a lot. So I was just wondering--
so my reaction to Mill's passage when
he's talking about Wordsworth is that
this poor guy--like, he just had this
nervous breakdown, and he's looking to
philosophy for some kind of solution or
rationalization, when really, like, he
should be going to the French Riviera
and, like, getting some therapy to deal
with his dad, right? So this kind of
made me think of this sort of
methodological question I have, which I
know it's not the main point of your talk,
but do you ever think that sometimes
people are bringing in philosophy as a
solution to problems that philosophy
wasn't really meant to solve? Like, here
he should have been looking to maybe a
more psychological solution. So I guess--I
don't know that there's a danger this
poses, but I guess I was just wondering if you
have any thoughts on, hey, when should we
look to philosophy when dealing with
these crises, personal crises, as opposed
to other kinds of causal stories.
Setiya: That's a great question. 
I mean, there's an answer I can
start to give for Mill, and there's an
answer, I suppose, for me. But so for Mill--
I mean, the thing is, what he turned to
first was Wordsworth. It was it was Wordsworth's
poetry that helped him. The
philosophy came in later when he asked
the question, why did Wordsworth's poetry
help me? You're right that there's
a question--might his answer at that
point have just been psychological?
It doesn't tell you anything deep about
the nature of the good life or different
kinds of value; it's just that for me
psychologically at that point it was
really helpful. I mean, one of the other
things he reports is that he started to
feel better when he was reading
Marmontel's memoirs. There's a passage
in the memoirs, where Marmentol
recounts the death of his father. And
Mill says, yeah, that--when I read that passage, 
for some reason I started to feel better. I don't--
[Audience laughs] 
I can't put my finger on it but something about it
really--so there are definitely moments
where he's not attempting to make
philosophical hay out of the things
that made him feel better. It just
happens that in this case it did. So when
I was writing the the midlife book, I was
sort of in this period of feeling, like,
I'm just gonna keep doing philosophy,
it's incredibly luxurious, I had this
wonderful life, why am I feeling like
it's completely empty. 
And I started thinking,
well, it's a question about the good life,
maybe philosophy will be helpful. But
like you, I went into it thinking, it
might be helpful. It may be that at the
end of this I'm, like, philosophy is
not helping at all. And I certainly don't
think, and it certainly wasn't true for me,
that philosophy by itself somehow
transformed my life and got me out of
the malaise. There was
plenty of therapy and meditation and
other things too. And it's not like I
feel like I'm exactly on the other side
of this. So I don't think--I think
you're right to suggest that there
are limits to what philosophy can do. On
the other hand, I don't think we know a
lot about what those limits are, because
philosophers have spent less time
thinking about the question, how far can
philosophical reflection on the good
life be helpful to people, than they
might have done. A lot of what I did in
the book, for instance the stuff that
Jessica was mentioning, was about regret.
There's a whole--there's elaborate
discussions about regret and the
temporality of preference and so on that
that have been pursued in ways that make
them look often a little bit abstract,
but turn out to be about, you know, this--
an inch away from applying to kind of
human difficulties that almost everyone
is struggling with at some point in
their life. So I feel like there's a lot
of untapped illumination in philosophy
that we can try to exploit and
make available to people, even if we're
not thinking philosophy is everything.
Hopkins: Okay, sorry, we're out of time. But outside
there is, if not a symposium, then at
least a reception, and you're very
welcome to come and pursue the
discussion with Kieran there. First, I
think we should thank him for that
rarest of things in a perfect example of
its own subject matter. So thank you.
[Audience applauds]
