Modern Philosophy and The Role of The Philosopher feat. Justin E. H. Smith

What does it mean to be a philosopher? What does it mean to DO Philosophy? What are the boundaries of philosophy as a discipline? These are just some of the themes that have pervaded the work of Justin Smith. 

Justin Smith is a professor of philosophy in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Paris, and he has written several books, including the upcoming “The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is: A History, a Philosophy, a Warning” out March 22nd 2022.

Justin and Greg dive deep into Justin's 2016 book “The Philosopher: A History in Six Types,” what it means to be a modern philosopher, the “bookshelf classification” problem, and how philosophy can address the modern economy of attention. 

Episode Quotes:

On social media:

And rather than social media being truly subjected to democratic oversight, things are going to continue to get worse. In terms of the topsy turvy social upheaval of social mobbing that is, in a sense, ruining everything. You can't do anything in the way you could have expected to do it 10 years ago.

And in terms of the universal surveillance that these new technologies are affording, these things are just going to keep getting worse and worse until there's real democratic oversight. And that's going to be extremely hard. And I think that it's only going to come after a period of worsening of the conditions of our social life together up to a point where people just won't take it anymore.

Philosophy as an academic discipline:

Now, I think philosophy as an academic discipline has failed tremendously to discover interesting things about how we think. Because what it in fact ends up doing is reflecting on the way “we,” not Qua* human beings, but “we, Qua* WEIRD, 21st century wealthy, educated Americans take things to be.

The importance of philosophy:

One thing is that we live in a world where we're side by side, neighbor by neighbor, with people we don't understand. People who are strangers to us and of whom we’re extremely suspicious and this leads to constant conflict. And one thing about this approach that I am promoting is that it enables a kind of humility.

Once you start to realize all of the delirious range of ways people have made sense of the world around them and still somehow managed to thrive, even though these ways are totally foreign from the way we make sense of the world. 

Modern philosophy:

So there's this new demand to find philosophy where we weren't detecting it before. That's coming down almost as a kind of administrative pressure - like philosophers, at least in the United States are under pressure to do this. And ironically for me, it's making them open, but also somewhat inconsistent because even though they're becoming more open about what can count as philosophy, they're still pretending, there is somewhere, a well-defined demarcation such that such that John Locke is a philosopher and Lawrence Stern is not, right?

Show Links:

Guest Profile:

• Professional Profile at Paris Diderot University
• Justin E. H. Smith’s Website
• Justin E. H. Smith on Twitter

His work:

• Justin E.H Smith on Substack
• The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is: A History, a Philosophy, a Warning
• Irrationality: A History of the Dark Side of Reason
• Nature, Human Nature, and Human Difference: Race in Early Modern Philosophy
• The Philosopher: A History in Six Types
• Divine Machines: Leibniz and the Sciences of Life