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learn more at [Music] arcades.in conversations withth tyler.com [Music] today I I am here with Rebecca KLA who is a professor of philosophy and a senior research scholar in the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown she
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has formal academic training not only in philosophy but also in geography Health policy wine Classical Ballet and she competes as a nationally sanctioned amuter in powerlifting and boxing her two main books are first mass hysteria
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medicine culture and mother's bodies and second yo and low the pragmatic Topography of the space of reasons co-authored with Mark Lance she has a forthcoming book City living how Urban spaces and urban dwellers make one another coming out from Oxford University press and overall her main areas of research expertise are social epistemology philosophy of language applied philosophy of science bioethics and feminist and anti-oppressive thought
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Rebecca welcome thank you for having me let me start with a very simple question about Fem feminism what would be a rhetorical disadvantage that many women are at that even say educated or so-called Progressive men would be unlikely to see a rhetorical
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disadvantage that we're at that's a fascinating question I think that there is almost no correct way for a woman to use her voice and hold her body to project the proper kind of expertise and Authority in a conversation I think that
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there's um massive I I don't even want to call it a double bind because it's a multi-dimensional bind where if we sound to feminine sounding feminine in this culture is coded as frivolous and unserious if we sound to unfeminine then
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we sound like we are violating gender Norms or like we are unpleasant or trying to be like a man I think that almost any way in which we position oursel if if we try to be polite and make nice then we come off as weak if we
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don't make nice then we're held to a higher standard for our um appropriate behavior than men are I think there's almost no way we can position ourselves so that we sound as experts so often times the content of our words matters
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less than our embodied presentation as a woman and do you think there's a rhetorical disadvantage that even most women or educated women would be unlikely to see you mean that they would be unlikely to see about themselves right like not just about other women
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yeah I actually think that everything I just said holds just as much or almost as much for women as for men I think we're all trained up really early regardless of our own gender we're all trained up extremely early on hearing
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male voices as authoritative and seeing masculine self-presentations as authoritative and so we don't see them as authoritative in women either whether or not we are a women it was actually a um a real eye opener for me you know a
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lot of times women will get advice to do things like not up talk where you end your comment with what sounds like a question right that's up talking and women do it more than men do and we're told that it sounds weak and open-ended
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or we're told not to talk in a high voice because High voices are coded as non-authoritative and unserious and I sort of accepted all that advice until somebody pointed out to me one day that the prior question is why do we hear
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high is less serious than low right before we even get to that Point why do high voices sound unserious to us and why does uptalking sound unserious to us so I think at a very basic basic level that even women don't generally question
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just everything that's coded as feminine comes off as less authoritative and I really want to make sure to add on here or bring back in the point that plenty of women are not particularly feminine so it's not like we can just avoid this
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by not coming off as feminine because if we don't come off as feminine then there are a whole other set of penalties that we're subject to that we come off as violating Norms or as just hard to understand or as you know I don't want
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to use a bad word on the air but as meriting various gendered insults that get thrown our way a lot if we don't uphold those Norms so let's say it's public discourse and a woman is speaking or writing and leads with the words
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quote speaking as a woman dot dot dot you as a philosopher when is this a valid way to introduce a point and when is it not it's a fantastic question and and there are so many levels of complexity and how to answer it I'm
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trying to choose so I think that is it okay if I sort of wind back and go back 20 years and then make my way back to the question so I think that 20 or 30 years ago a lot of feminist philosophers were just starting what's now known as
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standpoint epistemology which is a version of epistemology that in its sophisticated form I'm very I'm very sympathetic with but in its early relatively unsophisticated form the idea was that women just in virtue of belonging to the group women had a
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particular perspective coming out of their set of experiences that was not substitutable by somebody who hadn't that had that set of experiences so it was very important to include women's voice Quay women so that they could
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represent this perspective and this set of experiences I think that over the years the idea that there is a thing no matter how much you pair back that there is a thing that is women's common experiences or women's common
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perspective has become increasingly debunked including among feminists almost nobody would stand up for that anymore and everybody understands that every woman is different and that women's experience are inflected by their race class body shape ability
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level age region of the country just innumerable details that are going to intersect with and shape their experience so there isn't such a thing as the women's perspective so you might think that that means that there's never
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a point to saying speaking as a woman blah blah blah because you can never speak for women so why speak as a women but I do think that there are times where a conversation is going on in a way that universalizes a male positioning and it
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helps to intrude into that conversation and say look there are other people in the room who don't have the position that you are presuming now that doesn't mean that we all have the same position as one another but it does mean that
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there's a usefulness to reminding people rhetorically sometimes that what might seem like a universal position is not in fact a universal position so speaking in as a woman might just mean speaking as not the kind of man who all of you are
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right now presuming is the neutral case or not even noticing that you're taking as the neutral case Kate man's recent book down girl if I understand it properly one argument is that misogyny is best thought of as a kind of
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enforcement structure for sexist Norms that so there are like good women who follow certain norms and then quote unquote bad women who don't follow those norms and violate them and the misogyny is a kind of punishment on the so-called
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bad women to strengthen the norm do you agree with that perspective or not in Broad outlines yes um I I mean I is it the best way of understanding misogyny what percentage of misogyny is it explaining to be an economist for a
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moment that's fair um okay so to be both of philosopher and an economist for a moment I think that as a philosopher what I'm going to say is that terms like misogyny as they're used in Lay language don't have single neat meanings people's
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actual uses of them on the ground are messy and conflictual and so on so when we say is this the proper understanding of misogyny we always have to understand that as a kind of a normative or a prescriptive project as much as a
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descriptive project what we're saying is is this the most useful productive way of understanding misogyny understanding that there's going to be lots of other things that people mean by it that don't fall under this heading and lots of
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other things that we could have called misogyny that aren't going to fit it and so on but is this a productive strategy and if that's how I'm understanding the question then I think yes I think it's a very productive understanding of
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misogyny that's going to go a long way towards making clear a lot of social phenomena and the reason I like it what what what I like most about it so I disagree with Kate man in some of the details but what I really appreciate most about her
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account is that misogyny becomes about social structures and social norms rather than about particular men having particular icky ideas or intentions in their head in general I think trying to figure out what's going on inside people's heads or what they're feeling or what they're intending is kind of morally uninteresting and epistemologically impossible we never know what's going on in people's heads and in fact the empirical evidence shows
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that people we don't know what's going on in our own heads very well either you can prove that people don't understand their own intentions or the contents of their own minds very well so I think understanding misogyny as hateful attitudes towards women or ill intentions towards women is a non-starter what I love about Professor man's version is what she wants to say is look misogyny is a system of social norms that are embedded in our practices
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and in our environments and our institutions that serve to punish women who step out of their proper gender roles and keep women in various ways in the primary role of serving men's needs and that part at that level of generality I think
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is extremely helpful what are the systematic cognitive biases in the American understanding of pregnancy okay topic change in a way but not quite no I yeah no that's fine I just I was waiting for more misogyny this is a kind of misogyny
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I guess yeah um so I think that there's a long so this was what my first book Mass hysteria was about I think that we have a centuries old way of conceiving the pregnant body and the task of pregnancy that has led to some really profound
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distortions in how we understand pregnancy and particularly how we understand what pregnant women should do what Their responsibilities are and how we give advice to pregnant women and in particular we have seen so one part of
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it is arguably just true and not the part that I really pick on which is that pregnant women are responsible with their bodies for creating the next generation of people right so in some sense the pregnant body has a kind of a
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civic responsibility which is really distinctive out of that pregnant body is going to come a person who's going to belong to the Next Generation and so there's been this sort of long-standing idea that goes back several hundred years that
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the pregnant body creates the body politics so we all have a collective investment in how that process goes so far so good at the same time though pregnant women's bodies have been seen as profoundly untrustworthy I think
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because women and women's bodies have been seen as profoundly untrustworthy right women have been seen as easily swayed by hormones and emotions as fragile as easy to tempt into various kinds of bad behaviors as not really understanding science very well so as
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not knowing how to regulate their bodies as being undisciplined and so on and so we've developed this kind of double idea that women's bodies are super risky but also have this incredibly important task and as a result I think we've developed
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all kinds of Science and norms and advice based around this idea that women have to be hyper disciplined and hyperroll at all times particularly when they're pregnant or things will go terribly terribly arai so if you go back
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a couple hundred this is my favorite example of this if you go back a couple hundred years there was this supposedly scientific concept of the maternal imagination and the idea was that if pregnant women saw things or felt things
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or encountered things during their pregnancy that got them all riled up it would directly Mark the body of the fetus so like if they really crave stru berries their fetus would have a strawberry birthmark or the most hilarious one is if they found
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themselves accidentally lusting after a black man their baby would turn out black so there was this idea that we had to like completely control women's environments and keep them in a nice calm you know low stimulation environment throughout their pregnancy so that they didn't destroy their fetus because they're they were so weak and prone to these things I think this even though no very few people would claim that directly anymore that mentality
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continues now right there's this this idea that pregnant women can't get too emotional or the stress will destroy their fetus or they can't eat too much or they're going to turn their fetus into a future obese person it's a whole
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other conversation or they can't I mean there's you know they're supposed to regulate how much sex they have when they have sex what they eat what they breathe what they wear there's this wonderful quote in a famous pregnancy
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book that says with every single bite that you put in your mouth you should be asking yourself does this bite help my baby or am I just doing it for my own selfish end so this this idea like literally each time you put a piece of
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food in you you're supposed to be self-regulating and this has led to advice that's not only unfollow for women but to get more directly back to your question I think it leads people to see pregnant women as constantly involved in this like highrisk project
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that requires intensive risk management and this has led to all kinds of unfollow advice and bad science um and just guilt right an enormous guilt because it's impossible because if you were to follow all these prescriptions
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at once you would have to just like not leave your room and then you would be accused of not getting enough exercise and harming your baby that way so I mean you literally can't do all the things that you're supposed to do at the same
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time so it just it leads to advice that is overd disciplinary and is punitive but is also just scientifically not grounded in the facts it's based in this mythology that women have this pure perfect being in them but they're likely
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to wreck that being at every moment and their job is to bring risk down to zero despite their dangerous bodies the women who don't breastfeed why don't they and how rational a decision is that well it depends where they are and
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who they are to a large extent there's a huge worldwide emphasis on trying to get women to as they put it exclusively breastfeed as in no bottles nothing other than breast milk sometimes the advice is a year some sometimes the
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advice is 2 years if you live in a developed country with decent Medical Care and a clean water supply there's not really any interesting evidence that breastfeeding benefits your baby after certainly not after the first few weeks
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but maybe not even after the first few days there is pretty good evidence that those first few days of colostrum have a good immune effect even on babies who are in otherwise privileged situations so I think that women who manage to get
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a few days of breast milk into their baby if they live in a developed country have done everything from the point of view of helping their baby that they need to do and after that it should just be a matter of whatever works for their
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lifestyle of course on the other hand if you're in a developing country with a poor water supply and formula that you make based on the water is going to be dangerous and formula is expensive and so forth then compromising your ability
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to breastfeed feed by a bottle supplementation May in fact be a really bad choice because if you stop being able to breastfeed you're going to be stuck doing this much more expensive riskier thing that you might not be in a
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financial or physical position to do safely so I think there are good reasons to encourage breastfeeding and to fight back against the marketing of formula in precarious developing world countries but really no reason here now as to why
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women here don't breastfeed when they don't it heavily tracks right it heavily tracks class to me the most obvious overwhelming reason why women in the United States often don't breastfeed is that we have six weeks of unpaid
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leave and no further maternity leave so it's just literally physically hard to do we're getting better but aren't that great at giving women safe spaces to breastfeed you know it's it's wonderful that there's been a movement to let
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women breastfeed in public but honestly a lot of women don't want to breastfeed in public because it's stressful and it's awkward and they don't want to do that and so so giving women more spaces to do it giving them more privacy giving
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them more time off work would I think be the main things that would increase breastfeeding rates I think the really important point about breastfeeding in this American context is every woman has already gotten the message over and over
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and over again that breastfeeding is better for their baby they know that already so trying to guilt them into it or give them that message over and over again is pointless and guilt inducing if they're not breastfeeding it's because
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there are other barriers that are making it hard for them to do and the fact of the matter is they're harming their baby virtually Zero by not breastfeeding and in fact if they breastfed a little at the beginning they're arguably harming
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their baby zero so we should our approach should be the twin approach of supporting breastfeeding better and then leaving women alone when they choose not to do it for whatever reason or can't do it for whatever reason let's try a few
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questions about philosophy as a field what's most boring about philosophy as a field so many things are boring about philosophy as a field what's most boring about philosophy as a field so philosophy is changing really really fast but
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sometimes I have to remind myself that it's not changing as fast as I think it is because I'm in something of a philosophy sub bubble I mostly talk to people who I find interesting and who find me interesting and we all find each
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other interesting and so it's sometimes I have to remind myself that there's a whole world of philosophy out there that isn't changing as fast as it feels like it is but I think so you know talking about the discipline as a whole and not
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necessarily the parts of it that are changing I think the most obviously boring thing is that philosophers have for ages not only have they not felt any pressure to deal with the real messy empirical world as they find it and to
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take empirical data and empirical science into account and to worry about what's actually happening in messy reality but on the contrary there's actually been it's been prized to not get your hands dirty in that way the kind of philosophy that manages to maximally abstract away from anything recognizable as a messy real world empirical situation has been the kind of philosophy that has been most lauded and received the most privilege in the field
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and so you know if you can find a way to talk about you know fundamental ethical questions or fundamental metaphysical questions in a way that translates it all into formal propositions and little toy thought experiments and never ever
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gets its hands dirty with any of the complexities of everyday life then traditionally you're the one who's doing philosophy in its purest form right the most a priori the most formal the cleanest kind of philosophy people who
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do that kind of philosophy congratulate themselves regularly about how clear they are and in fact I think to anybody except one another they're not clear at all they've created this internal jar aristic abstract language which is
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utterly impenetrable to anybody other than the few people who are using it with tortured sentence structures and and I think that their self- congratulatory Clarity is a kind of an ideological myth on the other hand I think this is changing enormously I
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think there are all kinds of parts of philosophy that are becoming more and more vibrant and attracting more and more people where the whole point is to start with the world and what it is that we can say about the world and how we
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can intervene on that world and to let ourselves get our hands dirty and to take the responsibility of reading science and reading social science and making sure that what we're saying is responsive to empirical reality so to me
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philosophy is getting a lot less boring as long as I stick to my friends should there be more cursing in philosophy so if yo and low are meaningful Expressions what about curse words I'm a bad person to ask because well so so I I was once giving a um a
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seminar at Penn State and it was a 2-hour seminar and I was like an hour and a half into giving it and because I thought that I wanted to be this very responsible person I turned to the people in the room and I said you
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know I I don't know what the Norms are here would it be okay if I said the f word except I didn't say the f word I actually said the f word that's almost not even a curse word anymore that's and the room cracked up and I I didn't
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understand why they were laughing and finally somebody said oh well you've already dropped it like 12 times you just didn't notice so um I'm a bad person to ask about profanity because I use profanity so constantly and fluently and
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automatically then I also I often don't notice when I'm using it however to take your question more seriously yes I think that let me try to give you a more serious philosophy answer one of my main interests and one
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of my longest standing research programs as you hinted is in speech act Theory right in thinking about language not in terms of what particular words mean not in terms of their semantics but instead thinking about what philosophers call
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the pragmatics of language namely what do particular acts of speaking actually do how are they interventions on the world right so simple examples of speech hack theory is that assertions and imperatives do different things if I
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assert something to you I've now tried to transmit a piece of information but if I issue an imperative I've now tried to transmit to you an obligation I'm trying to make you do something which is just a different act right or if I warn
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you that's a different kind of act again if I name you that's a completely different kind of act so I think that cursing and profanity is a whole domain of speech acts that has all kinds of interesting and subtle social effects
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that just can't be substituted for by non- curse words you can take the curse words out but then you have lessened the performative and pragmatic power of our language and different curse words used in different different ways have really
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different kinds of effects and those effects can be you know anything any kind of speech hat can be misused or used well so yes um profanity can be used to harm and to pointlessly offend or to lessen a conversation but it can
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also be used strategically to carry out all kinds of social functions and shifts in Social space that we just can't substitute with other words even if those words have the same meaning because even if they have the same meaning their pragmatic Force isn't the
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same so to me cursing is a rich toolbox I try with dubious success not to overuse it but it's a toolbox that I'm not willing to give up and I think that more and more philosophers would probably agree with that there's more
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and more work on profanity taking it as a serious philosophical topic which I'm excited to see anecdotally it's often suggested that there's more sexual harassment in philosophy than many other areas of Academia do you agree and if so
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so what's the sociological reason why this is the case yeah I honestly I would be really careful before saying whether I agree or not because I'm only in philosophy and I don't know how people are making those comparisons I'm not in philosophy and
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anecdotally it seems true to me that there's much more in philosophy than economics I mean anecdotally they we've certainly had more than our share of stories and Scandals right and it's very hard to know if that's because we have
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more sexual harassment or if that's because we're more interested right now in reporting it like if our little me too movement started earlier than another fields or there may be lower monetary rewards to good behavior yeah
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so if you're an economist and you stay out of Scandal you can perhap ear more money than a philosopher could that's actually a great Point yeah I mean that there there hasn't yes the incentive structure has been very messed up about
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all of this and so yeah I just don't know if that if it's that we have more of it or if it's that the culture around reporting it and gossiping about it is more but in a way it doesn't matter right because we have a lot of it which
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is really your point so the comparative doesn't matter I mean why do we have a lot of it philosophy is a dramatically less gender balanced field than any of the other social sciences or Humanities and then most of the stem Fields the
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numbers in philosophy are pretty dire but what's most interesting about them is that as feminist philosophy has been on the rise and as you know Consciousness about gender issues in the academy has been on the rise our numbers
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haven't changed all that much if you go back and look like 30 years or 50 years even the percentage of women who say make full Professor for instance is not that different than it's ever been there are more female graduate students now
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but how that translates into changing the discipline is unclear so I mean I think part of it is just the very boring fact that it's a male-dominated field right and male dominated fields are likely to have more sexual harassment it
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seems to me because there's more of that male culture that's unchecked I do think also that and I want to say publicly that not all departments are like this and my department at Georgetown is very much not like this so I don't want this
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to be heard as about my department but I do think in many departments in philosophy there's a kind of a a guru culture that goes on where there are people at the top of the field the big stars of the department who are usually
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male just statistically for the reasons I said who have more power than they even understand that they have and everybody feels um a very deep need to please them and do what they say and so on and so the the power relations the
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the the whole power setup is just ripe for exploitation there was just a case that I'm sure you heard about that was not in philosophy despite the fact that it keeps being reported as if it was in philosophy where um it was a woman who
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had that star status Vita ronell and she was the one who was grotesquely harassing her students and using her status as the kind of Guru star of the department to do it so I don't even think that it's just men who exploit
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that position but I do think that in philosophy it's mostly men who are in a position to do that to start with ultimately I don't have a really deep explanation for why we have so many scandals but it is depressing I mean you
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you've I've just found out again and again that even departments that I thought were functional when you really start talking to people and especially when you really start talking to graduate students who are not men you find out more and more depressing
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stories about just how willing people are to exploit their positions in the department I mean I think that in departments that have graduate students I me it's just such a weird relationship already right it's an adult supervising
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another adult the second adult tends to be younger but they're an adult The Graduate students are around for years they're in this intense working Rel relationships with the professors it's easy if you're a professor to feel like
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that relationship is a socially equal one because you're just hanging out with another adult who's interested in your field whereas the graduate student is hyper aware of the fact that you can make or break their lives and that it's
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not an equal relationship and so a lot of those power differentials get hidden from the person wielding the power and I just think it's an extremely easy position to exploit and we've got thousands of years of this idea of you
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know the wise old Professor being this kind of erotic figure that gets pulled into all of these Dynamics but it's been a really um toxic difficult time over the last I don't know 10 years in philosophy and I hope it's getting
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better from all of this let's try an exercise I'm going to call out the names of various philosophers or thinkers and just give us your brief take on what's interesting in them or if you want you can attack them how's that okay and if I
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haven't heard of them should I admit that to you let's start with Hegel have you heard of him yes I've heard of Hegel what's your take so I'm supposed to say let's just go over the rules again what's interesting in Hegel what's
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interesting in Hegel okay you ask hard questions this is why you're good at your job right I think hegel's fascinating and I think the main idea in Hegel that is fascinating is that any cultural moment or a set of ideas or a set of practices
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is always internally contradictory in ways it doesn't notice that there are tensions built into it and that what happens over time is that those tensions bubble up to the surface and in the course of trying to resolve themsel they
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create something newer and better and smarter that incorporates both of the original sides that was a much more hegelian way of putting it than I wanted it to come out but basically the idea that going out and looking for consistency in the world
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is hopeless instead what we should do is figure out how the contradictions in the world are themselves productive and push history forward and push ideas forward is what I take to be the key interesting hegelian idea Michelle Fuko how well is
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it held up oh you're asking me about people I mostly love I think but empirically a lot of Doubt has been cast upon it right on the details of his empirical genealogical stories you mean yes but I think the basic fukan picture
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which is let's reduce Fuko to just two little bits here right one basic piece of the fukan picture is that power is not a unified unilateral top down thing power expresses itself in all of the little micro interactions that go on
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between people and between people in their environments all the time right so power isn't about a big set of rules that's imposed on people power is about all of the little things that we do with one another as we move through the world
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and all of those add up to structures of power rather than being imposed top down I think that has been at least for me and for many other people an incredibly fertile productive way of starting to think about social phenomena the other
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bit of the fan picture that I think is incredibly important is the idea that a lot of this happens at the level of concrete fleshy bodies and material spaces right so power isn't sets of abstract rules power is the way that we
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are trained up when we are little kids to hold our legs in a certain way or to hold our face in a certain way or to wear certain kinds of clothing power is the way that schools are built with desks and rows that enforces a certain
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direction of the Gaze and so on I mean I could go on and on but the way that the materiality of our bodies and our habits and our environment ments is where power gets a hold and where our social patterns and Norms are grounded rather
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than in some kinds of highlevel principles or laws is also I think very fertile and that's independent of the details of his genealogical stories because yeah he does seem to have played fairly fast and loose with actual
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historical details in a lot of cases the reemergence of the stoics into public discourse most of all in Silicon Valley but not only I don't know that I have an opinion on that one that one's one that I know is out there but that hasn't
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penetrated actual professional philosophy much I got to say heiger I've looked at every page of heiger is being in time I'm not sure I can say I've read the book what's in there what's in there okay I have an incredibly emotional and
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vexed relationship to haiger I no longer I used to publish on haiger and I don't anymore that was a conscious choice that I made this is not yet a direct answer to your question but I will answer your question we always knew knew heiger was
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a Nazi philosophers for many years had this line which was that oh yeah you know politically he was a Nazi because everybody was but it has nothing to do with his philosophy I think that was just wful obtuseness on the part of people who
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wanted to read him and take him seriously I think that more and more has come out showing just How Deeply held his Nazi convictions were and that it was not just him going along with the crowd it was stuff that he deeply
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believed and in a lot of books that don't get read as much he explains in detail the ways in which Nazism shaped his ideas and I think that now that we have entered an era in which there are real live Nazis crawling out of the
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woodwork and having a serious voice in public discourse my intellectual labor is finite and I've just decided I'm not willing to spend any more of it on a Nazi that said back in the day I took haiger really seriously and I found him
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a really important thinker I'm trying to think of what the the a cute little nugget of take-home summary of being in time might be um it's like the Monty pythons get summarized Bruce right yeah right okay so this is you know any of my
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hiig girl friends who hear this are going to think this is a ridiculously um oversimplified caricature but I'm going to do it anyway I think that the core idea of being in time is that to understand what something is ontologically is not a question that can
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be answered unless we understand the context in which we're asking the question so if what you're trying to do is physics then you're going to break the world into the kind of objects that are useful for doing physics right you
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know independent objects that have the properties that physics needs them to have if what you're trying to do is to use a very high toar an example like you know build a chair then you're not going to break the world into the objects of
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physics you're going to break the world into the tools that would be useful for you to build a chair right so you're going to think of the world in terms of things like Hammers and saws and nails and you're not going to care that much
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what the physical structure of the hammer is what you're going to care about is that the hammer is a good thing to use for making a chair at this moment for banging in a nail so thinking of things in terms of their tool like
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function versus thinking of them as physical objects are just two kind it's not like one is more right or one is more wrong it's also not some sort of spooky subjectivism it's just recognizing that our useful ontological categories are indexed to what we're in
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the midst of trying to do and further more thinking of other people is yet another category right so it's not most useful to think of other people as physical objects or as tools it's most useful to think of other people as
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entities who are engaged in certain kinds of projects and self-reflections and so on and it's that's a whole separate ontology where it's not really an interesting question to think about how that does or doesn't reduce to a
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physicalist ontology or or or some other kind of ontology was that at all comprehensible I think so okay let's try Russo's reveries of the solitary Walker Oh I have nothing but positive things to say about Russo's Rees of the solitary
37:20
Walker so the question is why is it important why is it important I feel like almost Nobody But Me understands important it is Russo is probably my favorite writer from the entire history of philosophy and one of the things I most love about
37:38
rouso and that has been really influential on me is that for him the style of writing and the mode of writing is not separable from the content of what he wants to convey so he wrote dialogues he wrote traditional
37:55
philosophy Works he wrote books and composed entirely of letters you know epistolary novels um he wrote operas he wrote in pretty much every he wrote autobiographies he wrote in pretty much every genre and each of those genres is
38:10
designed to make certain kinds of philosophical points possible they're not separate from the content of what he has to say reveries of a solitary Walker there you know there's more to say about it than I'm going to be able to say here
38:24
but the most noticeable thing about it is that it's a special kind of autobiographical book that I don't think anybody had written before where he's autobiograph ising as it were as he moves through space as he walks and so he's reflecting
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on how his own relationship to what's around him and his own movement through space shapes who he understands himself as being what he can see what he can't see and I think that this idea that place and location and movement have a
39:00
constitutive impact on what we can think what we can see how we can philosophize is an incredibly deep and moving insight and just to see why this is important compare it to somebody like dekart who starts his meditations famously by
39:17
saying well I want to do good philosophy so what I'm going to do is I'm going to lock myself in the room and I'm going to close the windows and I'm not going to move I'm going to make sure I can't see anybody else is going to distract me and
39:27
that I can't hear anything because I just want a completely blank solitary environment so I can think clearly that's a very specific kind of location right it's a there's all kinds of fascinating assumptions built into the
39:39
idea that you do your best thinking when you're sitting still in a blank room not talking to anybody else and I think for hundreds of years most philosophers never even thought to question the basic shape of decart's idea there right that
39:53
basically philosophy was a thing you did when you weren't distracted by the world or other people and everything was staying the same so that you could just have your abstract thoughts Russo comes along and very intentionally and explicitly inverts dayart and says I can only do philosophy when I'm moving through the world and noticing things like my feet hurt when I go up this hill and that guy over there won't talk to me because he thinks I'm
40:16
weird what's that about and you know he this this kind of responsiveness to the world around him and to the other people around him and to his motion as he travels is to the philosophy he can do and it's a much deeper inversion of the
40:30
sort of cartisian solitary model of thinking Than People notice when you talk with your graduate students do you sit down with them or do you go for walks with them really both great question I um do all kinds of very
40:42
different things with my graduate students depending on what we need to do you know so sometimes we go out and meet in a busy coffee shop because I feel like that will be helpful sometimes we sit in my quiet office honestly I've had
40:53
graduate students who I've boxed with pretty seriously and we've talked about dissertation work in between rounds in the boxing gym as we're punching each other which is pretty embodied so yeah I think that's a great question and I
41:06
never really thought of it that way until you asked me the question but I do go out of my way to sort of change up the environment and the motion depending on what kind of conversation I think it's useful for us to have and in
41:17
particular I find that what I have to talk about philosophically with my graduate students or other people is um dependent on what city I'm in too just dependent on the entire physical environment around me and what kind of stimuli I'm experiencing from a
41:30
philosophical point of view why is boxing good for you and who's the philosopher with the best theory of exercise huh from a philosophical point of view why is boxing good for me I don't know if this is technically from a
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philosophical point of view but here's two things one is I think philosophers who only do philosophy and nothing else tend to be kind of bad boring philosophers closely related to everything I've already end up saying today and closely
42:00
related to what I just said about rouso I think so I have a a new colleague this year at Georgetown FEI taiwo he just finished his PhD at UCLA fantastic young philosopher and he gave an interview recently and one thing he said really
42:15
stuck out for me which was that so many philosophers think that philosophy is about responding to other texts and other people and they forget that it's first and foremost about responding to the world and I think that if you just
42:28
do philosophy you kind of literally don't have material like you can read other people's philosophy books and respond to them but you don't have any actual Rich juicy material and so for me having a lot of other things in my life
42:41
other than philosophy has always been where I've gotten I mean imagine if you were a stand-up comic and all you did is sit there and try to write comedy all day long right you wouldn't have any material I don't actually think it's
42:51
very different philosophers and comedians have almost the same job which is to come up up with sharp penetrating quirky insights about the world and so you need to be out there in the world and so I've always had a lot of things
43:03
that I've done other than philosophy that have mattered to me intrinsically for their own sake but also instrumentally I think they've made My Philosophy better so boxing falls under that General category the other thing is
43:15
though I don't regulate my emotions very well unless I can exhaust myself honestly and I just I write better and work better and think better and I'm a calmer more levelheaded and smarter person if I have managed to get out my rather large amount of energy and
43:34
aggression and so it's extremely helpful for me to sort of exhaust myself in the ring many times a week in order to do the rest of what I'm supposed to do this may in fact be a segue from rouso and boxing but how is it you ended up
43:46
working on urban geography is just just the consistency of Rebecca KLA and it looks like a deviation from philosophy but it's actually the next logical step you started walking with rouso you got to a city and you thought this is the
43:59
place here are my thoughts or how did that go yeah I mean I think that actually there's been a really skillful narrative behind this interview so far I mean you keep on engaging me on topics where I end up talking about the
44:13
importance of place and motion so long before it ever occurred to me to do a degree in geography I was always just fascinated by the role of play it seemed to me that there was this turn going on in philosophy that sort of has
44:29
been going on since I was a graduate student kind of started in the '90s where philosphers got really interested in embodiment you know they suddenly remembered that we have bodies and so they started doing all this work thinking about the role that being
44:43
embodied plays in what it is to be a person to be a thinker how we think what we perceive and so on but those bodies were always still like oddly displaced bodies they were like bodies that weren't anywhere in particular I and
44:56
philosophers examples were always things like opening a door knob or something like that these very abstract minimal interactions with the world whereas to me a key feature of being embodied is that you're embodied somewhere and the
45:09
somewhere that you are is just this endlessly complex concrete space and I think that has a huge impact on all of these questions to do with subjectivity agency Free Will perception how we perceive danger how we perceive safety
45:24
and so on so I I've always been interested in that separately I've just kind of non-academically always been obsessed with cities I grew up smack in the middle of a giant City I loved it it gave me freedom I started exploring it
45:37
very young and this is Toronto yeah this is Toronto I grew up smack in the middle of Toronto which was a very you know usable City for a young kid and completely non-academically exploring cities eating in cities getting to know cities has
45:52
been my favorite thing to do for as long as I can remember just walking for hours and hours and hours in cities there's just really nothing that I would prefer to do than that a few years ago I started working on what started out as
46:05
this very just sort of traditional philosophy book thinking about how material spaces and the people who live in those spaces constitute one another so I was thinking about using things like some ecological niche Theory and
46:21
from philosophy biology and some other material like that some work from phenomenology to talk about how we are inherently shaped by the places that we are in but that likewise what people do is modify their spaces and their places
46:37
and give them new meanings and change them in the ways they need to make them suit their needs so there's a kind of a symbiotic relationship a niche building relationship between places and people and it seemed to me most interesting to
46:50
think about how that worked in urban spaces where you've got a whole lot of people in really complex space bumping up against one another you spent time working in Johannesburg South Africa right what did you learn there trying to
47:01
think how to boil it down to a single answer there at the philosophical level obviously you had facts about South Africa right yeah no no no I understand South Africa so the reason I was studying South Africa in particular is
47:14
because through my Geographic work I've been studying what I call repurposed cities which are cities that were very definitively built materially to support a particular social and economic and political regime that keeps people
47:31
separated in various ways and flowing in various ways and so on and then my question is well when that regime ends kind of abruptly and the city gets filled up with new people living in new ways that aren't suited to that material
47:42
form how does that thing I was just talking about happen right how do they rejig and remake their space to make it suit them and conversely how does this old found space shape what they can do with it so I was interested in
47:54
Johannesburg as a post apartheid City and trying to figure out I mean almost nobody you Johannesburg is mostly an immigrant City now it's a very small percentage of the people who live there are South African it's flooded with all
48:08
kinds of people from all over Africa who are not who the city was built a house and so it's got to repurpose itself in this very rapid dramatic way I guess if I had to take a philosophical punchline out of that experience it's that
48:23
apartheid was a system of top down segregation and Division and surveillance and now the city doesn't have that but it has substituted it with all kinds of bottomup strategies for self enclav and Division and drawing lines and territories between groups and
48:44
between people so that in a lot of ways the city is as divided and segregated as it ever was but in new ways so I think that one lesson to take out of it is that when people repurpose space that they don't necessarily repurpose it in
48:59
the direction of inclusivity and Harmony and so on sometimes they repurpose it in ways that are just going to introduce new kinds of Divisions that said that sounds really negative and I have to say I just I found johannisburg this
49:12
incredibly creative vibrant gorgeous exciting City and I really loved being there but at the same time there's just no denying that it's an incredibly fractured troubled space and it's fascinating to see the way people are of
49:25
Their Own cord fracturing it rather than healing it in a lot of cases what was interesting about medine Colombia oh I was actually in Bat oh B okay bogat was amazing I didn't know so much what to expect when I went to bat but it is um
49:42
so clearly it's just a physically absolutely beautiful city it may be the most beautiful city I've ever seen in terms of combining nature and artifice it's got these spectacular soaring Sky rises in this gorgeous colonialist AR
49:55
ecture all kind of up against the backdrop of the Andes and it's just it's Lush and it's super dramatic and beautiful but I guess what I was not expecting was just how functional that City seems to be I mean it's just an
50:10
incredibly easy City to walk around to be in to explore to eat in it was an extremely welcoming City it had the largest and most vibrant gay neighborhood that I might have seen in almost any City the street art in Colombia was fantastic I guess they have
50:30
a a new mayor who um has gone out of his way to encourage street art to sort of loosen up the graffiti laws and also to bring in Street Arts so the city is turning into this huge pallet and I guess the main way that it surprised me
50:46
was that I didn't realize that I had stereotypes about South American cities but I suppose I did and I suppose I expected it to be kind of a little bit dysfunctional and hard to manage and rough goinging and it was just such a
50:58
model of a well-run city at this point it was it was it was really inspiring is Tampa Florida underrated yes it's certainly underrated Tampa is another really complicated City so I lived there for several years I think a lot of people go to Tampa and
51:14
they either go there for business and end up in the suburbs at these sort of corporate business parks that are terrible or they have you know retired relatives around there who are living in gated communities that are terrible or
51:27
they go to the beach which is whatever it is it's the same as the beach everywhere in this country but if you actually go into the center of Tampa into inner city Tampa it's an incredibly distinctive City it um has a long history as a center of Labor activism
51:46
it's incredibly racially diverse it was a place where you know it was a Cigar City originally and it's filled with Cubans and Central Americans and Caribbeans and also Romanians and Jews and Italians and Spanish folks and they
51:58
all came together and they all created this kind of distinctive Tampa culture that actually really has its own food and its own music which is just a mixture of all of these things um and when you're in the middle of Tampa you
52:10
almost feel like you're in a different country I mean it's so Lush and it's so weird and it's so not organized there's almost no City Planning there whatsoever so you're in this city and you're you know in the middle of a business
52:21
district but there will be chickens walking by and there'll be like water Birds wandering across your path and there'll be geckos climbing up things and um it's all very tropical and exotic and evocative and at the same time it
52:36
has this really vibrant culture on the ground that almost nobody knows about because when they think of Tampa they just think of this sort of bland city that you get around the edges so I think not only is it underrated but it's
52:47
really kind of hidden and underere explored it's one of the few spots in the states that I feel has not really been minded yet compared to other urban areas how do you figure out where to eat in Washington DC where you live how do I
53:01
figure out where to eat here what's your model of the process of where good places are distributed so I live right in the middle of DC not in the suburbs and I actually find DC proper a totally fine but not especially inspiring place
53:15
to find food there's a lot of very medium food in DC DC is an interesting City because most of the interesting food is way out in the suburbs I don't drive so for me to get out to the suburbs it's a whole project but really if I want good food that's what I need to do I think that in the city of DC itself there's so much pressure to cater to the common denominator because mostly you have people having meetings constantly having meetings
53:46
right and they're meetings where nobody wants to offend anybody else because they're trying to make a political deal or they're trying to settle a case or it's a whatever it is and so they want the food to sort of be adequate and
53:56
respectable but intrude minimally into their experience and if you want to find good food you have to get away from all the meetings and you have to get out into the smaller ethnic enclaves in the suburbs and then I mean I you know I'm
54:13
not sure how much you want me to say about my process of finding food but for me it's this really complicated balance of reading user reviews knowing which user reviews I I have a good sense for which ones should be written off as as
54:28
um ignorable and which ones are worthwhile I find that places that have too many user reviews are usually Bland and places that have too few are not as good of a bet so you want to maximize the right number of user reviews of the
54:40
right kind and you want to make sure that the food is appropriate to the Ecology of the neighborhood it's in right that it's not you know an Ethiopian restaurant in a Thai neighborhood or whatever it may be those are less likely to be good so yeah
54:53
there's it's a complicated calculus for me but I find eating in DC itself just fine but I get more excited when I get to eat in other places let's try a question about Game Theory how well would polyamory work if everyone did it
55:07
would it work better or worse compared to now where a relatively smaller number of people are doing it so I know that as an economist you don't want me to introduce extra assumptions but I feel like I need to you have a thicker market
55:20
right but you might have less informed or less well specialized people doing it and which of those is more important yeah so I mean I think one of the reasons right now why polyamory works very well for a lot of the people who do
55:33
it is and this is directly addressing what I think you're getting at is because since it's a small non-standard community people really in order to make it work they have to do a lot of critical self-reflection um studying to figure
55:53
out what the Norms should be you can't can't just fall into polyamory right now if you're going to do it you have to explicitly sit there and think what am I trying to get out of this and then you have to explicitly negotiate with
56:04
partners and future Partners what are our shared Norms what are our expectations nothing can just be taken for granted the way it can for you know traditional heterosexual monogamous or purportedly monogamous relationships I think that for most straight monogamous
56:22
people there's very little thinking about what their you know fundamental relationship and sexual values and Norms are and what their boundaries are they just sort of go with the flow or you know to get back to your heiger would
56:33
say they they just find themselves thrown they just find themselves in the midst of the norms and carry on so your question about scaling it super depends on how it scaled right if if it became a thing that everybody did and in the
56:48
meantime what had built up and become just the unreflective norm were a bunch of you know crap happy misogynist exploitative practices then it would be worse if it scaled up and it scaled up in such a way that the unreflective
57:03
widespread Norms were better and thoughtful and more enlightened then it would be better so I just I don't I don't have an ininal question to whether scaling would make it better or worse to me it's all about how that how those Norms would end up developing organically and through reflection and discussion and what kind of sexual ecology we would end up with I mean I think the sexual ecology we have right now in the broader culture is pretty
57:31
messed up in a lot of ways we could end up with a better one or we could end up with one that recreated a lot of those forms of being messed up and just turned out to be exploitative it's very hard to guess in advance in some game theoretic
57:43
models having groups of three people is especially destabilizing four five six people you can have more Cooperative ad do you agree with that or not yeah I mean intuitively that feels right to me I you mean with with respect to
57:56
relationships and sexual little sexual ecologies yeah I think three is hard so this is my completely anecdotal unscientific response I think three is hard to make work yeah because yeah like the you always have an odd number and
58:12
each person is a third of the whole dynamic so there's nothing like you know major majorities that can be taken into account yeah it's It's Tricky two last questions first what was it like having dinner with Bernie Sanders was a really long time ago and I
58:27
was really young and it was really fun so this was when he was um a congressman in Vermont and he had this adorable series he loved academics and so he would just have these dinners with academics where he just wanted people to
58:46
come and have dinner and say say interesting things near him and my overwhelming impression of him was at that point and this is 25 years ago that he was just incredibly approachable and genuine he was doing this because he
59:01
just really liked the company of academics and didn't get it very often so the dinners I mean they were political in the sense that we debated political issues but I never felt like I was being you know used as a tool in the
59:11
Bernie machine or anything like that it really just felt like he wanted to talk to people and I as a very very young just starting out academic felt just incredibly excited and privileged to be among all of these enthusiastic intellect ual lefties who were all you
59:26
know yelling at one another and getting super excited about the rebirth of Socialism or whatever it may be it was really fun and what was it like seeing a movie with David Cronenberg and what in fact is his best film for me it's dead
59:38
ringers if you're wondering yeah so it wasn't like much have seeing a movie with him I was working in a movie theater and and the movie theater hosted a lot of premieres especially Canadian premieres this was in Canada and he was
59:53
there and you know I was young and excited that he was there but there was no great take-home story about our interaction or anything I have a total soft spot for the David Cronenberg movies that were just you know out and
1:00:04
out overthe toop exploding stuff in high drama so I loved scanners and I loved video Drome I love all the ones where it's just like gross stuff coming out of other stuff and so on I don't have a highly theoretical reason for that I
1:00:20
just I like movies that are extreme and I love that he was willing to be just incredibly lowbudget extreme in his imagery back in the day that was what was most fun for me Rebecca KLA thank you very much thank you thanks for listening to
1:00:35
conversations with Tyler you can subscribe to the podcast in iTunes Stitcher or your favorite podcast app and if you like this podcast please consider rating it on iTunes and leaving a review this helps other people find the [Music] show