PhilosophyPodcasts.Org

Wouter Kusters A Philosophy of Madness: The Experience of Psychotic Thinking MIT Press: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262044288/a-philosophy-of-madness/

1/11/25 • 43:30

The IPU at Corrigan Mental Health Center. This is a psychiatric IPU in Fall River, MA.  It's a DMH facility. Best parts: 1) there are some excellent staff members (excellent both for patients and for co-workers), (e.g., OT Kyle, providers Max and Allison, nurses Christian and Jill, tech Sean, Social Worker Nicole). 2) As a public-sector, unionized shop, the staff can be their authentic selves.  For those who don't like their jobs, they can express that openly.  They are not pressured to dissimulate.   3) for patients, if you are looking for a place to stay a while, (i.e., if you are okay with being detained longer than the usual 72 hours), and if you are young and hence able to access the outdoors space, it may be a good place.  If you are a patient of one of the Corrigan doctors (like Mayer, then an advantage of having Mayer as a doctor is that he is able to use this unit as an IPU for his regular outpatient clients.  He can keep them there in an emergency and thus provide a respite for the patient and their family, a chance to return to stabilization) Worst parts: (a) Approximately half of the patients do not have actual access to the outside.  The staff will tell you they provide four outdoor opportunities per day.  But for practical purposes, many of the patients cannot--orwould not be reasonably expected to--access the outdoors as provided by Corrigan.  (To go outside requires negotiating a steep set of stairs [it can be possible to take elevators but the elevators are difficult to operate, the techs don't make them readily available, and even when the techs are asked to take someone down in the elevator, they may choose not to. ).  In addition, accessing the outside can only be done in a large group.  Many of the patients are anxious in groups and would love to access the outside if they were able to do so individually, but prefer not to go down in the crowded group, long-stair, way with chains and locks, and authentically depressed staff).  (b) Taxpayers lose big time.  This is an extremely cost inefficient IPU.  It is staffed 24/7/365, (including always an on-call provider apparently), and the staffing levels are such that, during the day shift alone, there are more staff than patients!!! At one time, Corrigan IPU had 40 patients.  The folklore is that a patient there hung themself and, as a result, the beds were dropped all the way to 16.  But there are more than 16 staff working the day shift alone (not even counting the evening shift or nighttime shift).  During the daytime, there are 5 nurses (a charge nurse, another unit nurse, a med nurse, and two nurses in an administrative role (not on unit).  2 occupational therapists 2 providers 4 techs  and 3 social workers That is for 16 beds, and often a bed or two is empty, so let's say 15 patients on average. In addition, there are other staff who are not full time (or who work full time, but divide their time across the IPU and other operations): a pharmacist, a nutritionist (she may be full time), a peer advocate, a human rights officer, and more layers of admin. In addition, Corrigan tends to keep people longer than other inpatient units--- much longer (e.g., instead of 72 hours, one stays for months or even, for two patients, 2 years and counting).  Because of this, there are more court proceedings compared to units which churn more on a 72 hour cycle.  Few if any patients bring their own counsel.  So whenever there is a hearing, the taxpayers are paying for the DMH attorney, the Corrigan Staff, the patient's attorney, and the judge or magistrate. (c) social work.  Danielle K. LICSW.  The neolliberal social worker.  Confuses emotion with disregulation. Ethic of rules, not care.  "Science" equals acronym (MI, CBT, DBT, ACT).  Wounded healer.  Professionalism is emphasizing form over substance.  Social work is not about being a change agent, it is about flattering superiors and expecting worship from below.  Incensed that you don't get it?  Show emotion, but then suppress it and act cheerful and detached.  Then plot behind the scenes for your revenge.  The kernel of professional social work is pro forma.  For example, it is essential that each discharged patient have a schedule primary care appointment.  Despite the fact that there is no chance they would ever actually go to such an appointment.  CYA.  Adhere strictly to rules (whether or not those actually exist). Kiss up and pound down.  The scariest words in the English language: "I'm from the government, and I'm here to help." Overall.  somehow when Southcoast Behavioral was created, Corrigan was not folded in.  A staff of 50 to oversee 15 non-violent patients who don't have medical issues.  The unit doesn't even track which patients actually get outside for outdoor air and outdoor light.  On information and belief, about half of the patients never get outside, yet no accommodations are made.  (Frequently, the reason given for not being able to make changes is, of course, "we don't have the staff."  It should not be surprising that not one member of the professional staff is African American, and Dr. Mayer's patients (who comprise 20% of the population) are disproportionately if not entirely middle-class.  Be thankful you don't get the government you pay for.

12/14/24 • 45:14

Alenka Zupančič Disavowal This book argues that the psychoanalytic concept of disavowal best renders the structure underlying our contemporary social response to traumatic and disturbing events, from climate change to unsettling tectonic shifts in our social tissue. Unlike denialism and negation, disavowal functions by fully acknowledging what we disavow. Zupancic contends that disavowal, which sustains some belief by means of ardently proclaiming the knowledge of the opposite, is becoming a predominant feature of our social and political life. She also shows how the libidinal economy of disavowal is a key element of capitalist economy. The concept of fetishistic disavowal already exposes the objectified side of the mechanism of the disavowal, which follows the general formula: I know well, but all the same, the object-fetish allows me to disregard this knowledge. Zupancic adds another twist by showing how, in the prevailing structure of disavowal today, the mere act of declaring that we know becomes itself an object-fetish by which we intercept the reality of that very knowledge. This perverse deployment of knowledge deprives it of any reality. This structure of disavowal can be found not only in the more extreme and dramatic cases of conspiracy theories and re-emerging magical thinking, but even more so in the supposedly sober continuation of business as usual, combined with the call to adapt to the new reality. To disrupt this social embedding of disavowal, it is not enough to change the way we think: things need to change, and hence the way they think for us      

12/11/24 • 50:47

Stijn Vanheule Why Psychosis Is Not So Crazy A Road Map to Hope and Recovery for Families and Caregivers An expert’s guide to humanizing psychosis through communication offers key insights for family and friends to support loved ones during mental health crises. Are we all a little crazy? Roughly 15 percent of the population will have a psychotic experience, in which they lose contact with reality. Yet we often struggle to understand and talk about psychosis. Interactions between people build on the stories they tell each other—stories about the past, about who they are or what they want. In psychosis we can no longer rely on these stories, this shared language. So how should we communicate with someone experiencing reality in a radically different way than we are? Drawing on his work in psychoanalysis, Stijn Vanheule seeks to answer this question, which carries significant implications for mental health as a whole. With a combination of theory from Freud to Lacan, present-day research, and compelling examples from his own patients and well-known figures such as director David Lynch and artist Yayoi Kusama, he explores psychosis in an engaging way that can benefit those suffering from it as well as the people who care for and interact with them.

11/28/24 • 47:12

Peter Singer Consider the turkey Why this holiday season is a great time to rethink the traditional turkey feast.

11/10/24 • 45:10

Maria Balaska Anxiety and wonder On being human Description At times, we find ourselves unexpectedly immersed in a mood that lacks any clear object or identifiable cause. These uncanny moments tend to be hastily dismissed as inconsequential, left without explanation. Maria Balaska examines two such cases: wonder and anxiety – what it means to prepare for them, what life may look like after experiencing them, and what insights we can take from those experiences. For Kierkegaard anxiety is a door to freedom, for Heidegger wonder is a distress that opens us to the truth of Being, and for Wittgenstein wonder and anxiety are deeply connected to the ethical. Drawing on themes from these thinkers and bringing them into dialogue, Balaska argues that in our encounters with nothing we encounter the very potential of our existence. Most importantly, we confront what is most inconspicuous and fundamental about the human condition and what makes it possible to encounter anything at all: our distinct capacity for making sense of things. Table of Contents Preface Acknowledgments Abbreviations Introduction 1. What Makes Us Anxious? 2. Anxiety and the Origin of Human Existence 3. Wonder and the Origin of Philosophy 4. The Paradox of Anxiety and Wonder 5. After Anxiety and Wonder Notes Bibliography  Editorial Reviews Review “In this astute analysis of anxiety and wonder, Maria Balaska argues that understanding ourselves requires more than natural causal explanations and resists psychopathological approaches to overpowering experiences. With Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Lacan, she insightfully elucidates the deeply human desires to feel at home in the world and find meaning in it-and the possibility of their fulfilment.” ―Kate Kirkpatrick, Regent's Park College, University of Oxford, UK “Maria Balaska presents the best treatment to date of wonder and anxiety in Kierkegaard and Heidegger. Focused on the objectlessness of both experiences – what Kierkegaard calls the ambiguous power of spirit and Heidegger terms “the nothing” – the book draws as well on Freud, Lacan, Plato, and Wittgenstein to argue that living authentically means embracing the liberating power of one's mortal open-endedness. Capacious, insightful, and written in lucid prose, Prof. Balaska's text will enrich both lay and professional readers.'” ―Thomas Sheehan, Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies, German Studies and Philosophy, Stanford University, USA “Maria Balaska facilitates a conversation between Heidegger, Kierkegaard, Lacan and Wittgenstein that presents philosophy as embodying an anxious wonder at our capacity to make sense of things. She thereby deepens our understanding of all four thinkers, and illuminates not only the distinctive nature of philosophy, but its ineliminable role in the perennial human task of making sense of ourselves and our place in the universe.” ―Stephen Mulhall, Professor of Philosophy, University of Oxford, UK “This is an excellent book … A must-read for specialists interested in how continental philosophy can contribute to the thriving discourse on the experience and place of anxiety and wonder in our lives.” ―Philosophical Investigations About the Author Maria Balaska is a Research Fellow at Åbo Akademi University, Finland, and a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Hertfordshire, UK. She is the author of Wittgenstein and Lacan at the Limit: Meaning, and Astonishment (2019) and editor of Cora Diamond on Ethics (2020). Publisher ‏ : ‎ Bloomsbury Academic (May 2, 2024) Language ‏ : ‎ English Paperback ‏ : ‎ 168 pages ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1350302937 ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1350302938

10/11/24 • 49:29

Deirdre Nansen McCloskey Liberalism By revealed preference, Prof. McCloskey is our favorite scholar to talk with.  This is our third conversation with her. Today, we discuss two working papers on liberalism.

10/11/24 • 51:17

Sharon Patricia Holland an other   In an other, Sharon Patricia Holland offers a new theorization of the human animal/divide by shifting focus from distinction toward relation in ways that acknowledge that humans are also animals. Holland centers ethical commitments over ontological concerns to spotlight those moments when Black people ethically relate with animals. Drawing on writers and thinkers ranging from Hortense Spillers, Sara Ahmed, Toni Morrison, and C. E. Morgan to Jane Bennett, Jacques Derrida, and Donna Haraway, Holland decenters the human in Black feminist thought to interrogate blackness, insurgence, flesh, and femaleness. She examines MOVE’s incarnation as an animal liberation group; uses sovereignty in Morrison’s A Mercy to understand blackness, indigeneity, and the animal; analyzes Charles Burnett’s films as commentaries on the place of animals in Black life; and shows how equestrian novels address Black and animal life in ways that rehearse the practices of the slavocracy. By focusing on doing rather than being, Holland demonstrates that Black life is not solely likened to animal life; it is relational and world-forming with animal lives. “With her characteristic brilliance and speculative flair, Sharon Patricia Holland breaks new ground in an other, a book that will prove to be her most philosophical and speculative text yet. Holland pulls at the ways that blackness as ontology and epistemology undoes and ethically remakes the bio/zoopolitical distinction between animals and humans. She remakes the very ideas that underline life itself as a human project that both denies and relies on animality: love, death, knowing, being, and ultimately revolution as it happens on the scale of the ordinary and the everyday. An essential volume.” — Kyla Wazana Tompkins, author of Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the Nineteenth Century “Sharon Patricia Holland’s an other is a beautiful, expansive, rich, and genius gift to a world that could not have anticipated it. Her work at the level of the animal and cohabitation and about relationality and comportment is assuredly a necessary and brilliant offering. Holland’s enormous intervention cannot be overstated. Black studies will not be the same after this book.” — Sarah Jane Cervenak, author of Black Gathering: Art, Ecology, Ungiven Life Sharon Patricia Holland is Townsend Ludington Distinguished Professor of American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and author of The Erotic Life of Racism and Raising the Dead: Readings of Death and (Black) Subjectivity, both also published by Duke University Press

5/20/24 • 44:40

Stephanie Li Ugly White People: Writing Whiteness in Contemporary America White Americans are confronting their whiteness more than ever before, with political and social shifts ushering in a newfound racial awareness. And with white people increasingly seeing themselves as distinctly racialized (not simply as American or human), white writers are exposing a self-awareness of white racialized behavior—from staunch antiracism to virulent forms of xenophobic nationalism. Ugly White People explores representations of whiteness from twenty-first-century white American authors, revealing white recognition of the ugly forms whiteness can take. Stephanie Li argues that much of the twenty-first century has been defined by this rising consciousness of whiteness because of the imminent shift to a “majority minority” population and the growing diversification of America’s political, social, and cultural institutions. The result is literature that more directly grapples with whiteness as its own construct rather than a wrongly assumed norm. Li contextualizes a series of literary novels as collectively influenced by changes in racial and political attitudes. Turning to works by Dave Eggers, Sarah Smarsh, J. D. Vance, Claire Messud, Ben Lerner, and others, she traces the responses to white consciousness that breed shared manifestations of ugliness. The tension between acknowledging whiteness as an identity built on domination and the failure to remedy inequalities that have proliferated from this founding injustice is often the source of the ugly whiteness portrayed through these narratives. The questions posed in Ugly White People about the nature and future of whiteness are vital to understanding contemporary race relations in America. From the election of Trump and the rise of white nationalism to Karen memes and the war against critical race theory to the pervasive pattern of behavior among largely liberal-leaning whites, Li elucidates truths about whiteness that challenge any hope of national unity and, most devastatingly, the basic humanity of others.   Ugly White People is not about the 'racists' but about the way whiteness shapes the subjectivity of all white people. Relying on an elegant and parsimonious textual analysis of the work of contemporary authors, Stephanie Li shows how whites manage to evade while they acknowledge their whiteness, how they consume people of color through racist love, and how they accept whiteness in a way that neglects addressing racism. I highly recommend this book to readers interested in understanding contemporary whiteness. —  Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Duke University The best writing critically studying whiteness today intensely engages imbrications of race with other identities, especially class, gender, nationality, and disability. No one does all of that better than Stephanie Li. Addressing literary moments with a sure grasp of history and an adventuresome readings of texts, Ugly White People speaks compellingly to the persisting strength of Trump and white nationalism and to the desire for social media celebrity as something authors both explore and share. —  David Roediger, author of The Sinking Middle Class: A Political History of Debt, Misery, and the Drift to the Right   Stephanie Li is Lynne Cooper Harvey Distinguished Professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis. She is author of Pan-African American Literature, Playing in the White, and Signifying without Specifying.

5/4/24 • 47:18

Gilligan, Carol In a Human Voice Carol Gilligan's landmark book In a Different Voice – the "little book that started a revolution" – brought women's voices to the fore in work on the self and moral development, enabling women to be heard in their own right, and with their own integrity, for the first time. Forty years later, Gilligan returns to the subject matter of her classic book, re-examining its central arguments and concerns from the vantage point of the present. Thanks to the work that she and others have done in recent decades, it is now possible to clarify and articulate what couldn't quite be seen or said at the time of the original publication: that the "different voice" (of care ethics), although initially heard as a "feminine" voice, is in fact a human voice; that the voice it differs from is a patriarchal voice (bound to gender binaries and hierarchies); and that where patriarchy is in force or enforced, the human voice is a voice of resistance, and care ethics is an ethics of liberation. While gender is central to the story Gilligan tells, this is not a story about gender: it is a human story. With this clarification, it becomes evident why In a Different Voice continues to resonate strongly with people's experience and, perhaps more crucially, why the different voice is a voice for the 21st century. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- During the podcast, Mary Gaitskill's piece on Anna Karenina, from Fassler, Joe. Light the Dark: Writers on Creativity, Inspiration, and the Artistic Process (pp. 69-73). Penguin, excepted here:  MARY GAITSKILL "I Don’t Know You Anymore" I READ ANNA KARENINA for the first time about two years ago. It’s something I’d always meant to read, but for some reason I didn’t expect to like it as much as I did. ... I found one section in particular so beautiful and intelligent that I actually stood up as I was reading. I had to put the book down, I was so surprised by it—and it took the novel to a whole other level for me. Anna’s told her husband, Karenin, that she’s in love with another man and has been sleeping with him. You’re set up to see Karenin as an overly dignified but somewhat pitiable figure: He’s a proud, stiff person. He’s older than Anna is, and he’s balding, and he has this embarrassing mannerism of a squeaky voice. He’s hardened himself against Anna. He’s utterly disgusted with her for having gotten pregnant by her lover, Vronsky. But you have the impression at first that his pride is hurt more than anything else—which makes him unsympathetic.  Then he finds out Anna is dying, and he goes to visit her.]  He hears her babbling, in the height of her fever. And her words are unexpected: She’s saying how kind he is. That, of course, she knows he will forgive her. When Anna finally sees him, she looks at him with a kind of love he’s never seen before. ... Throughout the book, he’s always hated the way he’s felt disturbed by other people’s tears or sadness. But as he struggles with this feeling while Anna’s talking, Karenin finally realizes that the compassion he feels for other people is not weakness: For the first time, he perceives this reaction as joyful, and becomes completely overwhelmed with love and forgiveness. He actually kneels down and begins to cry in her arms; Anna holds him and embraces his balding head. The quality he hated is completely who he is—and this realization gives him incredible peace. He even decides he wants to shelter the little girl that Anna’s had with Vronsky (who sits nearby, so completely shamed by what he’s witnessing that he covers his face with his hands). You believe this complete turnaround. You believe it’s who these people really are. I find it strange that the moment these characters seem most like themselves is the moment when they’re behaving in ways we’ve never before seen. I don’t fully understand how this could be, but it’s wonderful that it works. But then the moment passes. Anna never talks about the “other woman” inside of her again. At first, I was disappointed. But then I thought: No, that’s actually much more realistic. What Tolstoy does is actually much better, because it’s more truthful. We feel a greater sense of loss, knowing it will never happen again. I very much saw that as the core of the book. Everyone says Anna Karenina is about individual desire going against society, but I think the opposite perspective is stronger: the way social forces actively go against the soft feelings of the individual.   

4/26/24 • 51:14

Merav Roth A Psychoanalytic Perspective on Reading Literature Reading the Reader (Art, Creativity, and Psychoanalysis Book Series) 1st Edition What are the unconscious processes involved in reading literature? How does literature influence our psychological development and existential challenges? A Psychoanalytic Perspective on Reading Literature offers a unique glimpse into the unconscious psychic processes and development involved in reading. The author listens to the 'free associations' of various literary characters, in numerous scenarios where the characters are themselves reading literature, thus revealing the mysterious ways in which reading literature helps us and contributes to our development. The book offers an introduction both to classic literature (Poe, Proust, Sartre, Semprún, Pessoa, Agnon and more) and to the major psychoanalytic concepts that can be used in reading it – all described and widely explained before being used as tools for interpreting the literary illustrations. The book thus offers a rich lexical psychoanalytic source, alongside its main aim in analysing the reader’s psychological mechanisms and development. Psychoanalytic interpretation of those literary readers opens three main avenues to the reader’s experience: the transference relations toward the literary characters; the literary work as means to transcend beyond the reader’s self-identity and existential boundaries; and mobilization of internal dialectic tensions towards new integration and psychic equilibrium. An Epilogue concludes by emphasising the transformational power embedded in reading literature. The fascinating dialogue between literature and psychoanalysis illuminates hitherto concealed aspects of each discipline and contributes to new insights in both fields. A Psychoanalytic Perspective on Reading Literature will be of great interest not only to psychoanalytic-psychotherapists and literature scholars, but also to a wider readership beyond these areas of study.

4/20/24 • 52:01

William Egginton Alejandro Jodorowsky Filmmaker and philosopher Alejandro Jodorowsky is a force of nature. At 95 years old he is still making films and is a cultural phenomenon who has influenced other artists as disparate as John Waters and Yoko Ono. Although his body of work has long been considered disjointed and random, William Egginton claims that Jodorowsky's writings, theatre work and mime, and his films, along with the therapeutic practice he calls psychomagic, can all be tied together to form the philosophical programme that underpins his films. Incorporating surrealism and thinkers including Lacan, Kant, Hegel, and Žižek into his interpretation of Jodorowsky's work, Egginton shows how his diverse films are connected by interpretive practices with a fundamental similarity to Lacanian psychoanalysis. Using case studies of Jodorowsky's cult films, El Topo, Fando y Lis and Holy Mountain and more, this book provides a unique perspective on a filmmaker whose work has been notoriously difficult to analyse.  

4/7/24 • 42:45

Peter Singer and Shih Chao-Hwei The Buddhist and the Ethicist: Conversations on effective altrusism, engaged Buddhism, and how to build a better world  ABOUT THE BUDDHIST AND THE ETHICIST Eastern spirituality and utilitarian philosophy meet in these unique dialogues between a Buddhist monastic and a moral philosopher on such issues as animal welfare, gender equality, the death penalty, and more An unlikely duo—Professor Peter Singer, a preeminent philosopher and professor of bioethics, and Venerable Shih Chao-Hwei, a Taiwanese Buddhist monastic and social activist—join forces to talk ethics in lively conversations that cross oceans, overcome language barriers, and bridge philosophies. The eye-opening dialogues collected here share unique perspectives on contemporary issues like animal welfare, gender equality, the death penalty, and more. Together, these two deep thinkers explore the foundation of ethics and key Buddhist concepts, and ultimately reveal how we can all move toward making the world a better place. “A remarkable and historical meeting of minds between one of the greatest philosophers of our times and a leading proponent of Buddhist ethics, grounded on utilitarianism and guided by compassion and insight, which aims at preventing and relieving all kinds of suffering, whatever they might be, and doing as much good as possible to all sentient beings without discrimination.” —Matthieu Ricard, author of Altruism and A Plea for Animals “Few things are more enlightening than good dialogue, and this engrossing conversation between a Western philosopher and an Asian Buddhist is a case in point. Their probing exploration of each other’s worldviews illuminates key concepts in the Buddhist and utilitarian traditions and reveals an underlying unity; these two schools of thought, though quite different in cultural ancestry, exhibit much commonality of purpose and spirit as they address some of life’s most important and challenging questions.” —Robert Wright, author of Why Buddhism Is True “The Buddhist and the Ethicist is a fascinating exchange between two brilliant and wide-ranging thinkers who were originally brought together because of their shared interests in animal welfare. Their conversations cover a staggering array of topics, and I truly enjoyed seeing what came out of their extremely active brains and hearts and how much they got mine going in many different directions. I guarantee you, too, will rethink some views you have on different ethical questions and will be exposed to many situations and dilemmas about which you’ve rarely or never thought. I know I’ll be returning to this valuable collection time and time again.” —Marc Bekoff, University of Colorado, author of The Animals’ Agenda: Freedom, Compassion, and Coexistence in the Human Age (with Jessica Pierce) and A Dog’s World: Imagining the Lives of Dogs in a World Without Humans (with Jessica Pierce) “This gem of a book invites readers to listen in as two brilliant contemporary moral philosophers talk about what it means to be a good person and live an ethical life. The Buddhist and the Ethicist offers us a living encounter between Western and Eastern moral traditions. We have the honor of sitting in as Peter Singer, one of the West’s most innovative and influential utilitarian philosophers, and Shih Chao-Hwei, a prominent Buddhist scholar, monastic, and activist, talk some of the most contentious and significant moral issues of our time, including human-animal relations, equality, sexuality, and effective altruism. Singer and Chao-Hwei show us how to have constructive, respectful dialogue about values—a skill more vitally important now than ever before. They remind us that it is possible to begin from seemingly conflicting points of view and, through open-minded conversation, to find and expand common ground.” —Jessica Pierce, author of Who’s a Good Dog? And How to Be a Better Human “This timely and stimulating dialogue between Professor Peter Singer and Venerable Chao-Hwei Shih takes place at the intersection between altruism and engaged Buddhism. Their many conversations through the intervening years have examined diverse and relevant social issues during the twenty-first century. Their incisive examination of ethical considerations for all life-forms, while ages old, are brought together in this book through candid discussions about ending life and killing from in utero, to euthanasia, suicide, and killing during wartime. At the same time, their dialogue integrates the crosscutting themes of women and equality, sexuality, animal rights, and more. I invite you to become a part of their dialogue through which you can revisit these topics that transcend cultures and countries.” —Sulak Sivaraksa, author, activist, and cofounder of the International Network of Engaged Buddhists “An enlightening exploration of ethics, altruism, and social justice through the engaging dialogue between a prominent philosopher and a great scholar of Buddhism. A must-read for those seeking to expand their understanding of these traditions and the pressing issues of our time.” —Netiwit Chotiphatphaisal, student activist, author, and engaged Buddhist “A wonderful book that does what philosophy and religious teachings are supposed to do: challenge us to think better, to live better, and to be better.” —Ryan Holiday, podcast host and author of The Daily Stoic “Their dialogues unfold in rigorous detail and probe rich and trenchant ethical questions. . . . Plenty of insight in these thought-provoking and challenging investigations.” —Publishers Weekly “In this fascinating book, Singer and Chao-Hwei explore dynamic topics, including animal welfare, capital punishment, gender equality, and the foundations of both Buddhism and ethics.” —Tricycle “Particularly illuminating is Chao-Hwei’s clarification of terms, often misunderstood in the West, such as karma, rebirth and nirvana, as well as the central role and nature of compassion in Buddhist ethics. For those interested in how nuanced philosophical thought can inform our daily lives and actions, this accessible meeting of minds is a good place to start.” —The Sydney Morning Herald (Non-fiction pick of the week)  

3/5/24 • 51:31

Peter Brooks Seduced by story: The use and abuse of narrative     Chosen by New York Magazine/Vulture as a Best Book of 2022 “There’s nothing in the world more powerful than a good story. Nothing can stop it. Nothing can defeat it.” So begins the scholar and literary critic Peter Brooks’s reckoning with today’s flourishing cult of story. Forty years after publishing his seminal work Reading for the Plot, his important contribution to what came to be known as the “narrative turn” in contemporary criticism and philosophy, Brooks returns to question the unquestioning fashion in which story is now embraced as an excuse or explanation and the fact that every brand or politician comes equipped with one. In a discussion that ranges from The Girl on the Train to legal argument, Brooks reminds us that among the powers of narrative is the power to deceive.   Praise A potent defense of attentive reading and its real-world applications. —Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times Brooks spent most of his career trying to impress upon readers the particular power of narrative…In his most recent book, “Seduced by Story,” he describes the horrifying feeling of having succeeded all too well. —Parul Sehgal, The New Yorker A succinct account of narrative persuasion, offering a solid case for the ambivalent power that stories can have in shaping us as individuals and nations. —Caterina Domeneghini, Los Angeles Review of Books Brooks explores various fields – including psychoanalysis, legal practice and modern political discourse – in which the distinction between narrative and “reality” has been eroded, or even collapsed. . . . It is in this context that a critical faculty – the ability to understand and critique narrative – is of vital importance. —Jonathan Taylor, TLS Brooks built an influential career arguing that stories are key features of how we all experience ‘human temporality’ and strive to articulate ‘meaning in general.’ This new book is, therefore, a kind of personal as well as intellectual reckoning with narrative turns and what may be their less salubrious legacies. —Killian Quigley, Australian Book Review Society’s obsession with résumé, and its use to construct an aura of credibility, is such a pervasive element of contemporary life that it inevitably implicates even the author and his own field of “literary humanities.” But that dynamic is exactly what Brooks parses in his terrific critical survey: the essential differences between surface stories and the ways in which they’re constructed. —J. Howard Rosier, New York Magazine/Vulture A bracing and insightful look at the downsides of reducing everything to storytelling. . . A thoughtful and revelatory analysis of what’s lost when story trumps all. —Publishers Weekly For writers, readers, and citizens of the story-addled world. —Emily Temple, Lit Hub A rhapsody to the partial suspension of disbelief that allows us to immerse ourselves in novels, but simultaneously and most crucially, a brilliant intervention against the complete suspension of disbelief that allows a citizenry to succumb to conspiracy theories, false-flag narratives, authoritarian fictions. An eloquent and triumphant culmination of Peter Brooks’s lifelong inquiry into the aesthetic and ethical intersection of literature, psychoanalysis, law, and politics. Impossibly good. —David Shields Stories are everywhere—shaping us, shocking us, showing us what really happened (or making it up). Peter Brooks invites us to step to one side of our over-storied surroundings to think about all the ways they work. . . . In the process, he tells a gripping tale of his own. —Rachel Bowlby This is an amazing book, crossing back and forth between literature and politics, illuminating each side by the other. It is written without fuss, continually evocative and surprising. —Richard Sennett

3/5/24 • 36:15

Daniel C. Dennett I've been thinking Description "How unfair for one man to be blessed with such a torrent of stimulating thoughts. Stimulating is an understatement." —Richard Dawkins A memoir by one of the greatest minds of our age, preeminent philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel C. Dennett. Daniel C. Dennett, preeminent philosopher and cognitive scientist, has spent his career considering the thorniest, most fundamental mysteries of the mind. Do we have free will? What is consciousness and how did it come about? What distinguishes human minds from the minds of animals? Dennett’s answers have profoundly shaped our age of philosophical thought. In I’ve Been Thinking, he reflects on his amazing career and lifelong scientific fascinations. Dennett’s relentless curiosity has taken him from a childhood in Beirut and the classrooms of Harvard, Oxford, and Tufts, to “Cognitive Cruises” on sailboats and the fields and orchards of Maine, and to laboratories and think tanks around the world. Along the way, I’ve Been Thinking provides a master class in the dominant themes of twentieth-century philosophy and cognitive science—including language, evolution, logic, religion, and AI—and reveals both the mistakes and breakthroughs that shaped Dennett’s theories. Key to this journey are Dennett’s interlocutors—Douglas Hofstadter, Marvin Minsky, Willard Van Orman Quine, Gilbert Ryle, Richard Rorty, Thomas Nagel, John Searle, Gerald Edelman, Stephen Jay Gould, Jerry Fodor, Rodney Brooks, and more—whose ideas, even when he disagreed with them, helped to form his convictions about the mind and consciousness. Studded with photographs and told with characteristic warmth, I’ve Been Thinking also instills the value of life beyond the university, one enriched by sculpture, music, farming, and deep connection to family. Dennett compels us to consider: What do I really think? And what if I’m wrong? This memoir by one of the greatest minds of our time will speak to anyone who seeks to balance a life of the mind with adventure and creativity.   Reviews and endorsements A delightful memoir from one of our deepest thinkers. Kirkus (starred review) Always an enthusiastic learner with an insatiable curiosity, Dennett’s amiable autodidacticism illustrates a life of the mind intertwined with the rich home life of a true Renaissance man. Highly recommended. Booklist (starred review)   About the author Daniel C. Dennett is University Professor Emeritus at Tufts University and the author of numerous books, including Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking, Breaking the Spell, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, and Consciousness Explained. He lives with his wife in Cape Elizabeth, Maine.

2/10/24 • 51:22

Christopher Bollas Conversations Transcript erratum: The director of the film “Zone of Interest” is Jonathan Glazer.  Christopher Bollas presents us with a new literary form in his Conversations: twenty-three unique dialogues to captivate, amuse, and inspire. The psychoanalyst Paula Heimann asked: 'Who is speaking? To whom? About what? And why now?' We speak with the voice and position of many others - mothers, fathers, siblings, teachers - and ordinary conversation therefore stages the history of our interpersonal engagements. Heimann's questions also apply when we talk to ourselves, and our inner dialogues reveal the hidden genius of our private world in which we are both actor and audience, poet and reader, politician and electorate. It's quite a ride, and an art form all of its own.

1/30/24 • 49:45

"Do you know my mom?"  The court-appointed monitor says that's off limits.   In this episode, Anna (pseudonym) tells her story.  Her son is 1yo, in diapers, when the police come to arrest her, while she attempts to contact her dealer for drugs before prison.  From there, she loses custody of her son, enters treatment, and tries to re-gain contact with her son.     Strong mom love, Anna shares her hard-earned wisdom.

1/26/24 • 51:00

Howard Kirschenbaum The life and work of Carl Rogers Twenty years after his death, PCCS Books celebrates the life and work of Carl Rogers with the long-awaited second edition of the much-acclaimed biography by Howard Kirschenbaum, On Becoming Carl Rogers. This completely re-written and re-titled edition extends to over 700 pages and includes a more detailed personal and professional history, an evaluation of the Wisconsin years and a full account of the last decade of Rogers' life.The years that followed the publication of the first edition of Carl Rogers' biography in 1979 turned out to be one of the most important periods of his career. Until now this work has not been widely known. Now, more than a quarter of a century after the first edition, Kirschenbaum has added deeper understanding of Rogers' contributions to psychology, the helping professions and society. On a personal level, access to recently revealed private papers tells us much more about Carl Rogers the man than was known to many of his closest associates.

1/14/24 • 50:56

Lauren Levine Risking Intimacy and Creative Transformation in Psychoanalysis Note: I had planned to interview Dr. Levine about her book.  Leading up to the date we had agreed on, I was struggling with what to talk to her about.  Timothy Williamson notes the gladitorial or adversarial nature of philosophical discussion.  I certainly had some critical commentary on Dr. Levine's book, but I also prefer to be reparative, as opposed to carpy-suspicious, as a reader (Sedgwick).  And it was my sense that in Dr. Levine's particular intellectual culture, sharp-edged criticism can be considered inappropriate, and even lead to cancellation (cf. Jon Mills's criticism of relational psychoanalysis).  In an email to Dr. Levine, I indicated my dilemma as we approached the date.  After mentioning that I did indeed have some potentially inappropriate (for some cultures) questions about her book, I realized there was a huge open question: she would probably want to know what they were.  Not wanting to be patronizing--and hoping that perhaps she would actually say my questions were all perfectly fine--I listed them.  But soon thereafter, I got an email from Dr. Levine saying Dr. Levine she did not, in fact, want to participate in the podcast interview about her book. It felt Karenesque of her and it felt like I was being canceled for daring to be critical, to engage in critique.  As Jon Mills will testify, this seems to be a problem with Levine's intellectual community: a strategy of ostracizing or refusing to speak with people who want to ask challenging questions. Stephen Mitchell himself seemed never to criticize any psychoanalytic theorist.  His mission was to affirm every psychoanalytic theorist, to show they they improved in some slight way on every previous theorist.  {Although as Barry Farber has emphasized, his validating ways did not extend outside the rich, prestigious, supposedly intellectual faction which houses themselves in psychoanalytic institutes.  Mitchell ignored Carl Rogers (probably because he never read him or certainly never took him seriously). For "relational psychoanalysts" if you are in their group, they flatter each other; if you are outside or want to ask challenging questions, they shun and cancel.  Contrast this with Judith Butler who stresses the importance of "checking in with other perspectives [and] responding thoroughly to reasonable questions."  So in an experiment, I did a podcast about her book, without her, without the author.  I want to do these about books (for example, books in which the author is, say, deceased.  Or the author is alive but in prioritizing their time, is unable to speak with me.  This gave me my first opportunity.  In this podcast, I review the negative, possibly out-of-bounds (as culturally defined) thoughts I had regarding Dr. Levine's book.  I'm also re-producing the offending email: BEGIN EMAIL On Tue, Mar 5, 2024 at 11:40 AM August Baker  wrote: Thank you for sharing your thoughts. As for me, after sending my email and before getting your reply, I was feeling increasingly uncertain about whether we had enough overlap or shared reality to have a productive talk.  Your email made me feel better about it, but I am still uncertain.     My last list was based on impressions, prior to a final review of the book.  I need to do a complete, close read of the book and propose a new list.    I tried to distinguish between "practitioner" vs. "academic," but I now think those were the wrong labels. And anyway as you point out, you are an academic as well as a practitioner.  I don't know how to label what I am talking about.  Perhaps I can best express the difference by paraphrasing one of my prior interviewees, Timothy Williamson.  He describes a particular cultural approach to how people should best talk to an author about a book.  I do not think it is the same cultural approach you have ("cultural" here referring here not so much to "practitioner" but to the culture of the intellectual school or paradigm you are a part of.  What to call that school?  I don't know.  Perhaps "early 21st century psychoanalysis.")     In Williamson's cultural milieu, discussion of a book is, he admits, something like gladiatorial combat, or like the adversarial system in litigation.  It is an interlocutor's role to give their most sharp-edged responses to an author.  The interlocutor argues against the author. "A feel-good slogan is that discussion should be constructive, not destructive. It sounds like a platitude, but imagine telling city planners that they should always build houses and never knock them down."   It's not about practitioner vs. academic. I was wrong in labeling it such.  It's not about Left vs. Right either.  I interview both Left and Right. It is one of the things I explicitly try to do: get a wide range of political standpoints. It's not about philosophy versus other fields either.  I don't know a good label for it, but perhaps we could call it "critical" versus "reparative."   Some authors have this "critical" approach.  They expect me and want me to give my most sharp-edged criticisms.  This is true whether I interview a Left-leaning philosopher like Martha Nussbaum or a Right-leaning economist like Deirdre McCloskey.   On the other hand, when I interview a psychoanalyst such as yourself--or such as Christopher Bollas whom I interviewed recently--I get myself into a more reparative frame of mind. It just seems to me a matter of being culturally sensitive.   The trouble is that with your book, I fear there is not enough overlap between us.  Your strength is your clinical vignettes; yet I am not a clinician, and the one thing I know about clinical work is that I don't know enough to talk intelligently about it.  On the other hand, there are many areas where you and I have a different worldview.  Yet I don't see a way to discuss those issues in a culturally-appropriate-enough way.   I can tell you a few of the ways that we are simply on different wavelengths.  There are many, but four come to mind immediately.    (1) politics. You write: "We are currently in the midst of a terrifying sociopolitical backlash by the radical right to suppress our stories, to silence and whitewash the white supremacy and racism embedded in our history and culture. We must face our legacy of chattel slavery and the slaughter of Indigenous people on which our country was founded."   I discussed this with Peter Brooks in a podcast I am publishing online today.  I simply don't agree with you here.  In my fantasy, if I try to empathize with you, you (correctly) view yourself here as taking a strong, righteous political stance, and as a matter of personal integrity, you don't want to back down off of it.   From my perspective, and I think you will find this offensive (and hence, I don't think it is productive to talk about it) there is much more to the story of the U.S. than slavery and the slaughter of indigenous people, and what you are doing is taking recourse in paranoia and splitting.     For numbers 2 and 3, consider the following quotations:   "Julia and I begin to weave together a shared narrative history about her early life, especially with her mother ..." "the rewriting of the family narrative seemed to open psychic space ..." "creating a share narrative of his traumatic history" "Coming to terms with the “lack” in parenting and the pain it caused is allowing ... "he needed me to feel the depths of his pain, to not abandon him like his parents when he pushed me to the brink,  (2)  Parenting.  I appreciate your narrative of your personal struggle with your son.  It gives me goosebump, and I admire and respect your parenting and your writing about it.  On the other hand, I have a very different perspective, having worked much with parents who, to my understanding, were great parents but for whom their narratives did not turn out so well.  Their children did not flourish, and they need to deal with that pain, as well as the stigma that I think is implicit in your own view. Namely, that if the parent does parenting right, the kid will turn out well and happy. This is the flip-side of the other psychoanalytic worldview, which I also bristle at, namely that if the adult is unhappy, look to the childhood and especially the parenting.     (3)  the importance of narrative.  I personally think that narrative is over-emphasized.  See my podcast with Peter Brooks.   Essentially, summing up (2) and (3), when you write to a psychoanalytic audience, is it not true that you can simply assume as a default that psychoanalysis cures by re-parenting?  That the basic story one learns in analysis is "I was a beautiful soul, but X was very bad."?   All psychoanalysts will agree that that is not the whole story, but nonetheless it is the strongest current, and exceptions seem to me to be of the sort that prove the rule.   That's fine, but many people outside of psychoanalysis do NOT share this view.  And it seems suspicious that tales of cure so often follow the same path, especially when we know that we should be suspicious of narratives.   (4) Regarding the relational school, I have two issues (again, neither of which seems suitable or appropriate for us to talk about),    (a) there is an understandable but irksome tendency to write its own narrative in an self-serving and insular way.  Barry Farber, for example, argues convincingly that much of the supposed revolutionary thoughts of relational psychoanalysis were anticipated by none other than Carl Rogers.  Yet Rogers is never given his due.  There is an intellectual arrogance to relational writing, as though Rogers were too much a lightweight to credit.   (b) Relational writing seems to neglect analytic hate in Winnicott's sense.  Relational analysts show a great deal of hate, but this doesn't seem to be talked about much.  It is talked about a little, but again as the exception that proves the rule.   I do not think that any of these four are appropriate for our conversation.  They are what I would talk about perhaps if I were adopting Williamson's cultural approach.     I will do a final read-through of your book to see if I can find some common ground for us for a productive conversation.   --August   END EMAIL       ENDORSEMENTS   As you can see below, others--indeed, those supposed to know--feel very differently than I: ‘In this exquisite new book, Lauren Levine captures the finely nuanced tapestry that emerges when an analytic dyad takes shape; the interweaving of two different narratives of self that come together, engage with each other, distance each other and ultimately form the subject matter of the analysis that unfolds. With brilliant clarity, and detailed and forthrightly honest clinical examples, Levine demonstrates how the collision of the patient’s and the analyst’s preferred life stories demands the analyst’s, at times painful emotional honesty, in re-opening dissociated pockets of enlivening engagement and creativity.’ Jody Messler Davies, NYU Postdoctoral Program, Stephen Mitchell Center for Relational Studies ‘In this powerful and creative volume, Risking Intimacy and Creative Transformation in Psychoanalysis, Lauren Levine explores the healing power of stories as they touch our vulnerabilities, our strengths and resilience, intrapsychic and sociocultural traumas. Levine beautifully explores the transformative value of sharing our stories with a listening, witnessing other, bearing witness to our wounds, our shame, and our collective sins.’ Galit Atlas, author of Emotional Inheritance; NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis ‘Risking Intimacy and Creative Transformation in Psychoanalysis is a wonder, a collection of essays whose honesty, integrity and authenticity challenge us and teach us, making us more vulnerable and hence more alive than we were before reading. It provides a relational blueprint to the intricacies of our deepest fears and fantasies about the psychoanalytic process as well as an openness to the insidious impact of racism and sociopolitical trauma. It is extremely rare that such a broad range of the human experience is taken on by any author; it is a rarity indeed for it to be done with such brilliance, thoughtfulness and creative care. This is a most welcome book, which should be read and re-read for the often painful aliveness it brings to the therapeutic encounter.’ Steve Tuber, author of Attachment, Play and Authenticity: Winnicott in Clinical Context ‘In this moving and incisive work, Lauren Levine reminds us that storytelling has both dangerous and curative dimensions. We often use stories to evade our own traumas and hide from self-awareness the gaps in our personal narratives. This has also been true of the field, in terms of the stories psychoanalysts feel comfortable engaging in our various models of the psyche. With an emphasis on the sharing of stories as the key to transformative mental healing, Risking Intimacy and Creative Transformation offers a powerful introduction to the insights of a relational psychoanalysis that can address the racial and cultural traumas of the 21st century.’ --Michelle Stephens, founding executive director, Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice, professor of English and Latino and Caribbean Studies, Rutgers University  ‘Lauren Levine explores the creative potential of what might be called story living. She captures how shared stories build relational and political transformations. But only, as Levine carefully details, when patient and analyst together confront personal inhibitions and cultural prohibitions that render stories normotic and deadening. Levine theorizes and clinically animates the ways in which we not only “tell ourselves stories in order to live,” as per Didion, but also how we tell stories to change the order of living.’ Ken Corbett, NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy ‘Lauren Levine’s highly creative work, Risking Intimacy and Creative Transformation in Psychoanalysis, marks the evolution of relational theory as a space of increasingly wonderful complexity. Her clinical and theoretical approach stresses the role of imagination and novel forms of clinical interaction. In this work, weaving film, poetry and dance into compelling psychoanalytic stories, we see both clinical and theoretical movement and expansion.’ Adrienne Harris, NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis and New School for Social Research BOOK BLURB Risking Intimacy and Creative Transformation in Psychoanalysis In this compelling book, Lauren Levine explores the transformative power of stories and storytelling in psychoanalysis to heal psychic wounds and create shared symbolic meaning and coherence out of ungrieved loss and trauma. Through evocative clinical stories, Levine considers the impact of trauma and creativity on the challenge of creating one’s own story, resonant with personal authenticity and a shared sense of culture and history. Levine sees creativity as an essential aspect of aliveness, and as transformative, emergent in the clinical process. She utilizes film, dance, poetry, literature, and dreams as creative frames to explore diverse aspects of psychoanalytic process. As a psychoanalyst and writer, Levine is interested in the stories we tell, individually and collectively, as well as what gets disavowed and dissociated by experiences of relational, intergenerational, and sociopolitical trauma. She is concerned too with whose stories get told and whose get erased, silenced, and marginalized. This crucial question, what gets left out of the narrative, and the potential for an intimate psychoanalytic process to help patients reclaim what has been lost, is at the heart of this volume. Attentive to the work of helping patients reclaim their memory and creative agency, this book will prove invaluable for psychoanalysts and psychotherapists in practice and in training. AUTHOR BLURB Lauren Levine is joint Editor-in-Chief of Psychoanalytic Dialogues. She teaches and presents both nationally and internationally, and has published articles about sociocultural, racial and relational trauma, resilience, and creativity. Dr. Levine is faculty at the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis, and the Stephen Mitchell Relational Study Center, where she is codirector of the One Year Program in Relational Studies. She is visiting faculty at the Institute for Relational and Group Psychotherapy in Athens, Greece, and the Tampa Bay Psychoanalytic Society, and supervisor at the Institute for Relational Psychoanalysis of Philadelphia. Dr. Levine is a psychoanalyst in private practice in New York City.

1/3/24 • 34:03

Thoughts on a degree-granting "program" at BU, called "Mental health counseling and behavioral medicine."  I took some classes there but eventually quit because it was so ridiculous.   What is "mental health counseling"?  U.S. states wanted to regulate who could become a psychotherapist, and, given the incredible demand, a variety of academic departments wanted to be able to offer degrees that would pass legislative muster.   Medicine was first, but also nursing.  Then schools of social work: the MSW degree suffices.  Then psychology departments created something called a PsyD, different from a PhD.  There is also pastoral counseling I believe.  Finally, there was this little field called "counseling" which was essentially career counseling, then school counseling.  Historically, it is part of the broad attempt by the middle class and managerial class to maintain order, and maintain their privileged status.  Counseling attempted to get people into jobs.  Then to keep students non-delinquent. Well, career counseling departments wanted also to take advantage of the huge demand for psychotherapy.  So they got legislative permission to create this new "mental health counseling" program.  Soon, of course, mental health counseling dominated and over-ran career counseling.  Career counseling now consists of one course in the BU program, and it is a course that is demeaned: take it in the summer, take it over some weekends.  The BU MHCBM program apologizes for having to offer it. What is "behavioral medicine"?  Somehow "behavior medicine" became part of the title of BU's program, but it represents only one course in the curriculum too.  A hypothesis is that it was thought that "behavioral medicine" would make the program seem more appropriately housed on the medical school campus.  Behavioral medicine teaches how counselors can assist physicians: helping physicians by taking over the work of getting people to stay on their doctor-prescribed plans (adhere to the prescribed regimen). At BU, there are two Mental-health counseling programs: this one in the medical school campus and the other in the Charles River campus. The version at the medical school is scientistic and run by some limited individuals, philistines.  The worldview is one of neoliberalism.  It is more than just whether people have jobs or are non-delinquent.  People are diseased if they do not cope with--are unhappy in--neoliberal society.  People need to learn to submit to authority more happily; they need to learn to follow rules.   And the program itself embodies this worldview in parallel process.  Faculty do not themselves set the curriculum; they defer to a higher power known as CACREP, which is an accreditation service.  Whenever therer is a difficult choice, the reply is that "this is required for our accreditation."  When accreditation is not specific enough, the faculty then bring in "consultants."  When in doubt, hire a consultant to deflect any responsibility from yourself.  Students are treated like they are in the military.  The program is more hierarchical than anything I have been a part of.  The faculty members insist on being called "doctor," and it is forbidden to treat them as anything other than Gods.  (It must be that some of the faculty have backgrounds in the military.  Or they think that they are following a medical school model of trying to break people down arbitrarily, a sort of right of passage showing one's ability to tolerate BOHICA.)  Criticism is wholly discouraged.  One should only find the positive in whatever one's classmates say.  One should never challenge the faculty.  Any failure is judged to be a lack of the "comportment" required to be a counselor.  (The most important thing for becoming a psychotherapist in this neoliberal world is to be someone who will happily sacrifice their integrity for the sake of arbitrary rules.  You can't say they are wrong: cf. the requirement to follow insurance rules). Faculty teach and model a polite exterior ... comportment ... professionalism ... regulated narcissism and s/m hate.  Plus there's the de rigeur "we are professional helpers; the problem with our profession is only that we tend to give too much; we have to mutually remind ourselves to remember to practice self-care!"   Laurie Craigen, Rachel Levy-Bell, Steve Brady, Thom Fields, Rory Berger-Greenstein, Navolta.

1/3/24 • 32:30

Deirdre Nansen McCloskey Crossing: A Transgender Memoir   A New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year   “I visited womanhood and stayed. It was not for the pleasures, though I discovered many I had not imagined, and many pains too. But calculating pleasures and pains was not the point. The point was who I am.”   Once a golden boy of conservative economics and a child of 1950s privilege, Deirdre McCloskey (formerly Donald) had wanted to change genders from the age of eleven. But it was a different time, one hostile to any sort of straying from the path—against gays, socialists, women with professions, men without hats, and so on—and certainly against gender transition. Finally, in 1995, at the age of fifty-three, it was time for McCloskey to cross the gender line.   Crossing is the story of McCloskey’s dramatic and poignant transformation from Donald to Dee to Deirdre. She chronicles the physical procedures and emotional evolution required and the legal and cultural roadblocks she faced in her journey to womanhood. By turns searing and humorous, this is the unflinching, unforgettable story of her transformation—what she lost, what she gained, and the women who lifted her up along the way.

12/14/23 • 55:11

Alex Byrne Trouble with gender: Sex facts, gender fictions Sex used to rule. Now gender identity is on the throne. Sex survives as a cheap imitation of its former self: assigned at birth, on a spectrum, socially constructed, and definitely not binary. Apparently quite a few of us fall outside the categories ‘male’ and ‘female’. But gender identity is said to be universal – we all have one. Humanity used to be cleaved into two sexes, whereas now the crucial division depends on whether our gender identity aligns with our body. If it does, we are cisgender; if it does not, we are transgender. The dethroning of sex has meant the threat of execution for formerly noble words such as ‘woman’ and ‘man’. In this provocative, bold, and humane book, the philosopher Alex Byrne pushes back against the new gender revolution. Drawing on evidence from biology, psychology, anthropology and sexology, Byrne exposes the flaws in the revolutionary manifesto. The book applies the tools of philosophy, accessibly and with flair, to gender, sex, transsexuality, patriarchy, our many identities, and our true or authentic selves.  The topics of Trouble with Gender are relevant to us all. This is a book for anyone who has wondered ‘Is sex binary?’, ‘Why are men and women different?’, ‘What is a woman?’ or, simply, ‘Where can I go to know more about these controversies?’ Revolutions devour their own children, and the gender revolution is no exception. Trouble with Gender joins the forefront of the counter-revolution, restoring sex to its rightful place, at the centre of what it means to be human.

12/1/23 • 46:12

Slavoj Žižek  Freedom: A Disease Without Cure We are all afraid that new dangers pose a threat to our hard-won freedoms, so what deserves attention is precisely the notion of freedom. The concept of freedom is deceptively simple. We think we understand it, but the moment we try and define it we encounter contradictions. In this new philosophical exploration, Slavoj Žižek argues that the experience of true, radical freedom is transient and fragile. Countering the idea of libertarian individualism, Žižek draws on philosophers Hegel, Kierkegaard and Heidegger, as well as the work of Kandinsky and Agatha Christie to examine the many facets of freedom and what we can learn from each of them. Today, with the latest advances in digital control, our social activity can be controlled and regulated to such a degree that the liberal notion of a free individual becomes obsolete and even meaningless. How will we be obliged to reinvent (or limit) the contours of our freedom? Tracing its connection to everything from capitalism and war to the state and environmental breakdown, Žižek takes us on an illuminating and entertaining journey that shows how a deeper understanding of freedom can offer hope in dark times.   Table of Contents Preface Acknowledgements Introduction: Move your Buridan's Ass! Part I: Freedom As Such Chapter 1: Freedom and its Discontents i) Freedom versus Liberty ii) Regulating Violations iii) Freedom, Knowledge, Necessity iv) Freedom to say NO Chapter 2: Is There Such a Thing as Freedom of the Will? i) Determinism and its Ragaries ii) Rewriting the Past iii) Beyond the Transcendental iv) Pascalean Wager Chapter 3: Indivisible Remainder and the Death of Death i) The Standpoint of the Absolute ii) The Death of God iii) Suicide as a Political Act iv)The Failed Negation of Negation Appendices I 1 Potestas versus Superdeterminism 2 Sublation as Dislocation 3 Inventing Anna, Inventing Madeleine 4 The Political Implications of Non-Representational Art Part II: Human Freedom Chapter 4: Marx Invented not Only Symptom but Also Drive i) Instead of... ii) Progress and Apathy iii) Dialectical Materialism iv) Yes, but... v) How Marx Invented Drive Chapter 5: The Path to Anarcho-Feudalism i) The Blue Pill Called Metaverse ii) From Cultural Capitalism to Crypto-Currencies iii) Savage Verticality Versus Uncontrollable Horizontality Chapter 6: The State and Counter-Revolution i) When the Social Link Disintegrates ii) The Limit of the Spontaneous Order iii) The State is Here to Stay iv) Do not give up on your Communist Desire! Appendices II 5 “Generalized Foreclosure”? No, Thanks! 6 Shamelessly Ashamed 7 A Muddle Instead of a Movie 8 How to Love a Homeland in our Global Era Finale: The Four Riders of the Apocalypse i) De-Nazifying… Ukraine, Kosovo, Europe ii) The End of Nature iii) DON'T Be True to Yourself! iv) Whose Servant Is a Master?

11/13/23 • 48:43

Bence Nanay Mental Imagery: Philosophy, Psychology, Neuroscience Mental Imagery: Philosophy, Psychology, Neuroscience is about mental imagery and the important work it does in our mental life. It plays a crucial role in the vast majority of our perceptual episodes. It also helps us understand many of the most puzzling features of perception (like the way it is influenced in a top-down manner and the way different sense-modalities interact). But mental imagery also plays a very important role in emotions, action execution, and even in our desires. In sum, there are very few mental phenomena that mental imagery doesn't show up in--in some way or other. The hope is that if we understand what mental imagery is, how it works and how it is related to other mental phenomena, we can make real progress on a number of important questions about the mind. This book is written for an interdisciplinary audience. As it aims to combine philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience to understand mental imagery, the author has not presupposed any prior knowledge in any of these disciplines, so any reader can follow the arguments.

10/22/23 • 51:47

Clancy Martin  How not to kill yourself: A portrait of the suicidal mind. FINALIST FOR THE KIRKUS PRIZE FOR NONFICTION • A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK • An intimate, insightful, at times even humorous blend of memoir and philosophy that examines why the thought of death is so compulsive for some while demonstrating that there’s always another solution—from the acclaimed writer and philosophy professor, based on his viral essay, “I’m Still Here.” “A deep meditation that searches through Martin’s past looking for answers about why he is the way he is, while also examining the role suicide has played in our culture for centuries, how it has evolved, and how philosophers have examined it.” —Esquire “A rock for people who’ve been troubled by suicidal ideation, or have someone in their lives who is.” —The New York Times “If you’re going to write a book about suicide, you have to be willing to say the true things, the scary things, the humiliating things. Because everybody who is being honest with themselves knows at least a little bit about the subject. If you lie or if you fudge, the reader will know.” The last time Clancy Martin tried to kill himself was in his basement with a dog leash. It was one of over ten attempts throughout the course of his life. But he didn’t die, and like many who consider taking their own lives, he hid the attempt from his wife, family, coworkers, and students, slipping back into his daily life with a hoarse voice, a raw neck, and series of vague explanations. In How Not to Kill Yourself, Martin chronicles his multiple suicide attempts in an intimate depiction of the mindset of someone obsessed with self-destruction. He argues that, for the vast majority of suicides, an attempt does not just come out of the blue, nor is it merely a violent reaction to a particular crisis or failure, but is the culmination of a host of long-standing issues. He also looks at the thinking of a number of great writers who have attempted suicide and detailed their experiences (such as David Foster Wallace, Yiyun Li, Akutagawa, Nelly Arcan, and others), at what the history of philosophy has to say both for and against suicide, and at the experiences of those who have reached out to him across the years to share their own struggles. The result combines memoir with critical inquiry to powerfully give voice to what for many has long been incomprehensible, while showing those presently grappling with suicidal thoughts that they are not alone, and that the desire to kill oneself—like other self-destructive desires—is almost always temporary and avoidable.   Clancy Martin, a Canadian, is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Missouri in Kansas City and at Ashoka University in Delhi, India. He divides his time between Kansas City and India. He is married to the writer Amie Barrodale, and has five children: Zelly, Margaret, Portia Ratna and Kali, and an unruly labradoodle, Simha. A Guggenheim Fellow, his work has been translated into more than thirty languages. He writes fiction, nonfiction and philosophy. He is a contributing editor for Harper's magazine and Vice magazine, and has published academic and popular articles, essays and Op-Ed pieces in such diverse places as New Yorker, The New York Times, Harper's, New Republic, 1843/The Economist, Lapham's Quarterly, The Atlantic, Ethics, The Wall Street Journal, The Journal of the History of Philosophy, Elle, Details, Men's Journal, The London Times, The London Review of Books, De Repubblicca, and many others. He is a contributor to the Teaching Company's "Great Courses" series. His work has been optioned for television/film development by Sony, HBO, Anonymous Content and other production companies. His most recent work is on suicide, failed suicide and suicidal ideation. He is a recovering alcoholic, and has written and been interviewed extensively about alcoholism, addiction and suicide.

10/6/23 • 51:24

Lorraine Daston Rules: A Short History of What We Live By (The Lawrence Stone Lectures)  A panoramic history of rules in the Western world Rules order almost every aspect of our lives. They set our work hours, dictate how we drive and set the table, tell us whether to offer an extended hand or cheek in greeting, and organize the rites of life, from birth through death. We may chafe under the rules we have, and yearn for ones we don’t, yet no culture could do without them. In Rules, historian Lorraine Daston traces their development in the Western tradition and shows how rules have evolved from ancient to modern times. Drawing on a rich trove of examples, including legal treatises, cookbooks, military manuals, traffic regulations, and game handbooks, Daston demonstrates that while the content of rules is dazzlingly diverse, the forms that they take are surprisingly few and long-lived. Daston uncovers three enduring kinds of rules: the algorithms that calculate and measure, the laws that govern, and the models that teach. She vividly illustrates how rules can change―how supple rules stiffen, or vice versa, and how once bothersome regulations become everyday norms. Rules have been devised for almost every imaginable activity and range from meticulous regulations to the laws of nature. Daston probes beneath this variety to investigate when rules work and when they don’t, and why some philosophical problems about rules are as ancient as philosophy itself while others are as modern as calculating machines. Rules offers a wide-angle view on the history of the constraints that guide us―whether we know it or not.  

6/15/23 • 00:58

Wendy Brown (Princeton) Nihilistic Times: Thinking with Max Weber (The Tanner Lectures on Human Values) One of America’s leading political theorists analyzes the nihilism degrading―and confounding―political and academic life today. Through readings of Max Weber’s Vocation Lectures, she proposes ways to counter nihilism’s devaluations of both knowledge and political responsibility. How has politics become a playpen for vain demagogues? Why has the university become an ideological war zone? What has happened to Truth? Wendy Brown places nihilism at the center of these predicaments. Emerging from European modernity’s replacement of God and tradition with science and reason, nihilism removes the foundation on which values, including that of truth itself, stand. It hyperpoliticizes knowledge and reduces the political sphere to displays of narcissism and irresponsible power plays. It renders the profound trivial, the future unimportant, and corruption banal. To consider remedies for this condition, Brown turns to Weber’s famous Vocation Lectures, delivered at the end of World War I. There, Weber himself decries the effects of nihilism on both scholarly and political life. He also spells out requirements for re-securing truth in the academy and integrity in politics. Famously opposing the two spheres to each other, he sought to restrict academic life to the pursuit of facts and reserve for the political realm the pursuit and legislation of values. Without accepting Weber’s arch oppositions, Brown acknowledges the distinctions they aim to mark as she charts reparative strategies for our own times. She calls for retrieving knowledge from hyperpoliticization without expunging values from research or teaching, and reflects on ways to embed responsibility in radical political action. Above all, she challenges the left to make good on its commitment to critical thinking by submitting all values to scrutiny in the classroom and to make good on its ambition for political transformation by twinning a radical democratic vision with charismatic leadership.

6/15/23 • 46:40

Timothy Williamson (Oxford, Yale) Philosophical method: A very short introduction From thought experiments, to deduction, to theories, this Very Short Introduction will cause you to totally rethink what philosophy is. Assuming no previous knowledge of philosophy, this is a highly accesible account of how modern philosophers think and work Presents a distinctive view of philosophy, arguing that it is far more scientific than many philosophers think Includes a wealth of examples from history charting the successes and failures of philosophical thinking Offers a timely and much needed intervention in the current hot debate on philosophical methodology What are philosophers trying to achieve? How can they succeed? Does philosophy make progress? Is it in competition with science, or doing something completely different, or neither? Timothy Williamson tackles some of the key questions surrounding philosophy in new and provocative ways, showing how philosophy begins in common sense curiosity, and develops through our capacity to dispute rationally with each other. Discussing philosophy's ability to clarify our thoughts, he explains why such clarification depends on the development of philosophical theories, and how those theories can be tested by imaginative thought experiments, and compared against each other by standards similar to those used in the natural and social sciences. He also shows how logical rigour can be understood as a way of enhancing the explanatory power of philosophical theories. Drawing on the history of philosophy to provide a track record of philosophical thinking's successes and failures, Williams overturns widely held dogmas about the distinctive nature of philosophy in comparison to the sciences, demystifies its methods, and considers the future of the discipline. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable. Previously published in hardback as Doing Philosophy Preface 1. Introduction 2. Starting from common sense 3. Disputing 4. Clarifying terms 5. Doing thought experiments 6. Comparing theories 7. Deducing 8. Using the history of philosophy 9. Using other fields 10. Model-building 11. Conclusion: the future of philosophy References and Further Reading Timothy Williamson is the Wykeham Professor of Logic at the University of Oxford, and A. Whitney Griswold Visiting Professor at Yale University. Previously he was the Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at Edinburgh University. He has published books and articles on many branches of philosophy, some of which have been translated into German, Spanish, French, Italian, Hungarian, Serbian, Turkish, Chinese, Korean, and other languages. He frequently writes on philosophy in the Times Literary Supplement, the New York Times blog The Stone, and newspapers in various countries.    

4/21/23 • 48:16

Clara E. Mattei (New School) The capital order: How economists invented austerity and paved the way to Fascism A Financial Times Best Book of the Year “A must-read, with key lessons for the future.”—Thomas Piketty A groundbreaking examination of austerity’s dark intellectual origins.  For more than a century, governments facing financial crisis have resorted to the economic policies of austerity—cuts to wages, fiscal spending, and public benefits—as a path to solvency. While these policies have been successful in appeasing creditors, they’ve had devastating effects on social and economic welfare in countries all over the world. Today, as austerity remains a favored policy among troubled states, an important question remains: What if solvency was never really the goal?  In The Capital Order, political economist Clara E. Mattei explores the intellectual origins of austerity to uncover its originating motives: the protection of capital—and indeed capitalism—in times of social upheaval from below.  Mattei traces modern austerity to its origins in interwar Britain and Italy, revealing how the threat of working-class power in the years after World War I animated a set of top-down economic policies that elevated owners, smothered workers, and imposed a rigid economic hierarchy across their societies. Where these policies “succeeded,” relatively speaking, was in their enrichment of certain parties, including employers and foreign-trade interests, who accumulated power and capital at the expense of labor. Here, Mattei argues, is where the true value of austerity can be observed: its insulation of entrenched privilege and its elimination of all alternatives to capitalism.  Drawing on newly uncovered archival material from Britain and Italy, much of it translated for the first time, The Capital Order offers a damning and essential new account of the rise of austerity—and of modern economics—at the levers of contemporary political power. 480 pages | 3 halftones, 8 line drawings, 3 tables | 6 x 9 | © 2022 Economics and Business: ECONOMICS--HISTORY, ECONOMICS--INTERNATIONAL AND COMPARATIVE History: EUROPEAN HISTORY, HISTORY OF IDEAS TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction Part I: War and Crisis 1 The Great War and the Economy 2 “A Wholly New School of Thought” 3 The Struggle for Economic Democracy 4 The New Order Part II: The Meaning of Austerity 5 International Technocrats and the Making of Austerity 6 Austerity, a British Story 7 Austerity, an Italian Story 8 Italian Austerity and Fascism through British Eyes 9 Austerity and Its “Successes” 10 Austerity Forever Afterword Acknowledgments Notes Bibliography Index   https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/C/bo181707138.html

4/3/23 • 40:29

Deirdre Nansen McCloskey (Cato Institute) Beyond positivism, behaviorism, and neoinstitutionalism in economics A penetrating analysis from one of the defining voices of contemporary economics. In Beyond Positivism, Behaviorism, and Neoinstitutionalism in Economics, Deirdre Nansen McCloskey zeroes in on the authoritarian cast of recent economics, arguing for a re-focusing on the liberated human. The behaviorist positivism fashionable in the field since the 1930s treats people from the outside. It yielded in Williamson and North a manipulative neo-institutionalism. McCloskey argues that institutions as causes are mainly temporary and intermediate, not ultimate. They are human-made, depending on words, myth, ethics, ideology, history, identity, professionalism, gossip, movies, what your mother taught you.  Humans create conversations as they go, in the economy as in the rest of life. In engaging and erudite prose, McCloskey exhibits in detail the scientific failures of neo-institutionalism. She proposes a “humanomics,” an economics with the humans left in.  Humanomics keeps theory, quantification, experiment, mathematics, econometrics, though insisting on more true rigor than is usual. It adds what can be learned about the economy from history, philosophy, literature, and all the sciences of humans. McCloskey reaffirms the durability of “market-tested innovation” against the imagined imperfections to be corrected by a perfect government. With her trademark zeal and incisive wit, she rebuilds the foundations of economics. REVIEWS “A compact discussion of some crucial issues economists should be contemplating.” The Enlightened Economist. "Beyond Positivism [presents] a criticism and reshaping of economic thought that departs from neoinstitutionalism and other non-‘humanomical’ movements, promoting the ethics of liberalism as the ideal foundation for an adequate economic science.” Journal of Economic Literature “The manuscript is a collection of writings for various forums, many reviews of others and many replies to critics. One unifying theme is a critique of neoinstitutional economics. But yet another theme is a defense of the bourgeois trilogy against its critics. This book is well worth a read.” Richard Langlois, University of Connecticut “This new book deepens the continuing conversation in Humanomics. It’s essentially about discovering Adam Smith and resuming a path that McCloskey has so magnificently helped to reinvigorate in the last half century.” Vernon Smith, Chapman University and 2002 Nobel Laureate in Economics TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction The Argument in Brief Part I. Economics Is in Scientific Trouble Chapter 1. An Antique, Unethical, and Badly Measured Behaviorism Doesn’t Yield Good Economic Science or Good Politics Chapter 2. Economics Needs to Get Serious about Measuring the Economy Chapter 3. The Number of Unmeasured “Imperfections” Is Embarrassingly Long Chapter 4. Historical Economics Can Measure Them, Showing Them to Be Small Chapter 5. The Worst of Orthodox Positivism Lacks Ethics and Measurement Part II. Neoinstitutionalism Shares in the Troubles Chapter 6. Even the Best of Neoinstitutionalism Lacks Measurement Chapter 7. And “Culture,” or Mistaken History, Will Not Repair It Chapter 8. That Is, Neoinstitutionalism, Like the Rest of Behavioral Positivism, Fails as History and as Economics Chapter 9. As It Fails in Logic and in Philosophy Chapter 10. Neoinstitutionalism, in Short, Is Not a Scientific Success Part III. Humanomics Can Save the Science Chapter 11. But It’s Been Hard for Positivists to Understand Humanomics Chapter 12. Yet We Can Get a Humanomics Chapter 13. And Although We Can’t Save Private Max U Chapter 14. We Can Save an Ethical Humanomics Acknowledgments Notes Works Cited Index https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/B/bo145786166.html 192 pages | 6 x 9 | © 2022 Economics and Business: ECONOMICS--GENERAL THEORY AND PRINCIPLES   TRANSCRIPT August Baker: Hello and welcome to Philosophy Podcast. I'm August Baker. Today I have the distinct pleasure of speaking with Professor Deirdre McCloskey. I'd say that her book The Rhetoric of Economics is one of the pop five books that influenced my understanding of economics. And it was such a great, exciting read, really.Deirdre McCloskey: Thank you.August Baker: You know her as the Distinguished Professor Emerita of Economics and of History, and Professor Emerita of English and of Communication at the University of Illinois, Chicago. However, after 34 years of praying for the Bears and the Cubs in Chicago, she has a new title now, which is a great title, Distinguished Scholar, Isaiah Berlin Chair in Liberal Thought at the Cato Institute. Welcome, Professor McCloskey.Deirdre McCloskey: Thank you, dear. I'm here in my home, which is right next door to Cato, so I'm three minutes away from my office.August Baker: Okay, good. How has the move been?Deirdre McCloskey: Well, if you've moved, you know how it is.August Baker: Yeah, I know.Deirdre McCloskey: It's really rough.August Baker: I know.Deirdre McCloskey: It's starting to come to together.August Baker: Good.Deirdre McCloskey: It'll be another week or so before everything's put away.August Baker: Gotcha. Okay. Okay, so today we're talking about your newest book Beyond Positivism, Behaviorism and Neoinstitutionalism in Economics, University of Chicago Press. And I would say that it's got some economics, it's got some philosophy of economics, sociology of economics. It's got some great nuggets and some gossip, and it's got some saying of things that you aren't supposed to say, but she says them. I thought maybe we could start with the economics, which I think to me is the great enrichment, which I had not heard of before, but what is that and what are the various schools of thought on that?Deirdre McCloskey: Well, the great enrichment is simply the amazing change in world income per head since 1800. In places like the United States, it's a factor of, I don't know, 40 places, and worldwide, a factor of 25 or 30 in the increased amount of goods and services that the average person could buy. And recently as 1960, about four out of the five billion people on the planet lived at $2 a day. Imagine living where you live on $2 a day. And now the average of the seven billion people on the planet, the average has gone up to about $50 a day and the same prices. And of that seven billion, one billion are still at this horrible $2 a day. So there's this enormous quantitative change, and it's so large that it's a qualitative change. It's a change in the character of life. I take it that you, like me, are a descendant of peasants or urban workers, unspeakably poor.August Baker: Right.Deirdre McCloskey: Here we are. So it's an amazing change, and the two usual explanations are exploitation from the Left. Europe is rich because it stole from the Third World or because of slavery or something. And on the other hand, savings accumulation, which is embodied in the very misleading word, capitalism, that piling up factories and roads and so on is how we get rich. Neither of those is correct, I would argue. And what actually caused our amazing increase in human scope since 1800 is the idea of liberalism, understood as equality of permission, allowing people, as the English say, to have a go. And this having a go has just been amazing. You look around your room and everything you see is someone's smart idea. So it's ideas that caused the modern world, not one group of people stealing from another or some people piling up capital. So that's that. And to just-August Baker: Yeah, please.Deirdre McCloskey: Connected with the theme of the book, the main thing of the book, the materialist suppositions in economics are ill-suited to understanding ideas. The ideas were philosophical, political, sociological, and it's those ideas that made us rich.August Baker: So did the idea of liberalism occur in 1800?Deirdre McCloskey: Yeah. It occurred, and although it sounds kind of single-minded to say it that way, it did occur. It's not ancient. It's not from, I don't know, Christianity or the Indo-European race. Not Indo-European, the European race, something like that. That's not what caused it. It happened in Northwestern Europe in the 17th and especially in the 18th century, starting in Holland and then transferred and translated to Britain, and then the North American colonies, such as Pennsylvania, Massachusetts. Now, these societies were not perfectly liberal by any means. The American founders were largely slave holders.Even Benjamin Franklin had owned slaves. But the idea was implanted and that idea that all people are created equal, and their equality consists of being allowed to do things, to have a go, keeps... It's very appealing to most people, although some people don't like to be adults, but it's appealing to most people. And it's extremely powerful, it inspirits people to invent in institutions, such as the modern university invented in 1910 at the University of Berlin, or the field of analytic or continental philosophy, just to speak of here ideas. And then ideas such as internal combustion engine or the computer, a zillion other things.August Baker: And so I guess one comment would be it doesn't seem to be necessary to let everyone have a go, but it's necessary to have a lot of people, enough people to have a go.Deirdre McCloskey: That's a very wise comment, because it's obvious that in the United States, for example, until 1865, substantial part of the population, all women, for example, and all Black enslaved people were not allowed to have a go. So it's this gradual increase, and as you said, if there are enough people?August Baker: Yeah.Deirdre McCloskey: Now, it can't be confined to a tiny, tiny class. That's not going to work and does not work. But in places like Hong Kong after the Second World War, or Ireland since the 1960s, you relieve people of obstacles to having a go, and they keep having a go. They keep trying things. That doesn't mean they succeed, but they're allowed to try.August Baker: And part of it is also, I think, for economists, the baker does not bake our bread out of a sense of benevolence. It's for a reward.Deirdre McCloskey: Yeah.August Baker: Now, I'm sure that people who are inventing things are not doing it solely for the money, but that would be part of it. People can have a go and they can get monetary rewards for doing so.Deirdre McCloskey: Yeah, it's true. But of course, it's always been so that if you allow people to invent, they would make money out of it. But there were very strong forces against invention. The very word innovation in English, and I think in French and so forth, is a bad word until the 19th century, because it suggests you're going to change religious conventions. "Oh, no, let's not do that." So there are these conservative forces that were temporarily overcome places, as I said, like Holland or Scotland, and immediately resulted in astonishing innovation. And then the innovation just got completely wacko. It got crazy. We're inventing all the time, new apps for our cell phones and so forth.August Baker: Yeah, right.Deirdre McCloskey: And yes, it's profit, but you and I know that in, say, academic life-August Baker: Right. Sure.Deirdre McCloskey: Money, profit is not where it's coming from.August Baker: Right.Deirdre McCloskey: And that's surprisingly true, I believe, if you actually talk to people in business, it's true in business, too.August Baker: Sure.Deirdre McCloskey: People like to found companies and to pursue their American dream, and it's not all material.August Baker: They like to work with other people for a common goal and compete and win and rise in the hierarchy and all of these things.Deirdre McCloskey: Exactly. And there are all kinds of other coin in which ones paid. And indeed, that passage from Adam Smith that you paraphrased.August Baker: Yeah.Deirdre McCloskey: Where you said it's not from the love of the butcher or the baker that we expect our dinner. It's actually an appeal to take the viewpoint of the other person to walk in his shoes. He called it the impartial spectator. It's very theatrical metaphor. And the impartial spectator, kind of substitute for God, is watching you. And in order to do well by your fellow humans, you have to be able to have moral empathy, fellow feeling, it means of course in Greek. And that's what he's talking about. It's not so much he's saying, "Oh yeah, everyone's driven by money. You got to give them money, or they won't do anything." That's not Adam Smith. It's some of his followers, I admit, but not Adam Smith.August Baker: You see, the way I think of that quote is, if you think of a new economic system and that economic system is, well, we're all going to work together and we're all going to do the best we can, and we're going to share with each other because we're going to all love each other, you think, "No, I don't believe it."Deirdre McCloskey: Well-August Baker: That's not going to happen.Deirdre McCloskey: But it works in a family.August Baker: True.Deirdre McCloskey: It works in a small group of friends, and I love it. It's wonderful. A bunch of colleagues, most academic departments don't behave like that. But still, that's the idea. And it works fine in a small group. The problem is it doesn't work at arm's length. You order something on Amazon, you're not depending on the love of the person at the other end. Although, indeed, in a odd way, you're depending on their sense of professionalism and so on.August Baker: Sure.Deirdre McCloskey: So in a large society, love doesn't work. And in fact, it's worse than that, because appeals to the love model in a large society, we have seen in the 20th century especially, are extremely dangerous.August Baker: Yeah.Deirdre McCloskey: The Germans loved the folk, the German people. And Hitler's vision of a thousand year Reich and people loved the Communist Party. And arousing this king and country passion in which you can do these things, you can also do terrible things.August Baker: Right.Deirdre McCloskey: So it's much better, it works for human flourishing to let people make deals between the smith and the baker.August Baker: Right. Now, if I were to... Excuse me. Go ahead.Deirdre McCloskey: You have a last words habit of thinking before you speak.August Baker: No, I just... Well, okay. Thank you.Deirdre McCloskey: Well, that's a good habit.August Baker: I appreciate that. Appreciate that. If I were to take a Marxist response, I would say... Well, I think two things, compound question. Sorry. One of them is, when you say ideas, a Marxist might say ideology. I think you actually pointed that out in your book.Deirdre McCloskey: Yeah. And I say I actually use the word ideology a lot. I think it's just fine.August Baker: Right. Okay.Deirdre McCloskey: Marx particularly adopted it from French where the word ideology, when he adopted it, didn't have the Marxist meaning, which I approve of. I was once a Marxist, so I'm very familiar with the German ideology and so forth.August Baker: Well, there's a funny... I think that the feel of your writing has something of Marxist, he's sarcastic with people.Deirdre McCloskey: I know. I'm sorry about that.August Baker: No, no.Deirdre McCloskey: It annoys people, and I don't mean to be mean.August Baker: Hey.Deirdre McCloskey: Yes, I do. I mean to be mean with stupid people who are not doing it right.August Baker: Right. The other thing, though, I would say is, okay, so the Marxist it's going to say, "Well, the ownership of means... what is required is ownership of the means of... Private ownership of the means of production."Deirdre McCloskey: That's what they'd say.August Baker: And they'd say-Deirdre McCloskey: That causes the ideas.August Baker: Right.Deirdre McCloskey: Ideas are merely the superstructure of the froth on top of the great waves and tides of material history.August Baker: Right.Deirdre McCloskey: It's the business of turning Hegel on his head.August Baker: And then I think they might also say, "Look, it's true that maybe even if we grant you that it wasn't capital accumulation or exploitation, which enabled this. Still, the exploitation, if you just think of it in sense of the worker is not going to be paid everything they protect, that would be required to accumulate large..."Deirdre McCloskey: Yeah. Except that accumulation is not where it's at. You accumulate once you have a new idea. You open a hairdressing salon in the neighborhood, and if it was a good idea to do so, and if you do good work or have some innovation in organizing a hairdressing salon, then it'll have success. And then you'll be able to buy more machines and you'll be able to... The big mistake in modern economics is that we can't get away from the conviction that capital accumulation is creative. But it's not, unless there's a smart idea behind it. I just wrote a column for a Brazilian newspaper in which I made this point. I said, "Look, just spending doesn't generate anything." You say, "Oh, we'll spend a lot on the northeast of Brazil, and that'll make it better off." If the ideas are stupid, if the spending is bad, and it's not doing new things or organizing things in a better way, then all it does is shuffle resources around without making the resources, namely people better off.August Baker: Right. That makes perfect sense. There's a lot more to talk about on this, but I want to go to the next part of your book. I would say, we'll talk about the critique of economics.Deirdre McCloskey: Sure.August Baker: You've got the... Very well shown that the scientism, the contempt for the humanities, the creepy behaviorism. I loved your discussion of that. The creepy is such a great word. The idea of incentives and these policies, economists, policymakers controlling these levers to control people for their own good. The ones that... You could speak to any of those if I misrepresented them. The other two that were so new to me was what you called the unmeasuring silliness.Deirdre McCloskey: Yeah.August Baker: And then the idea that the way economics is done is you spend the first week, if you think of economics as being a microeconomics course in graduate school, the first week is on the first and second welfare theorem, and the rest of the year are on the 108 imperfections.Deirdre McCloskey: Yeah.August Baker: My camera.Deirdre McCloskey: Those two are closely connected. Are you there?August Baker: I am. I'm going to fix my camera, but just go ahead.Deirdre McCloskey: It's okay. I'll go ahead. The justification for the social engineering that economists have gotten more and more enthralled by in the last century, since the 1920s, is that, oh my word, there are so many imperfections in this economy. But my first response as an economic historian is, have you heard of the great enrichment? Don't you know that this highly imperfect economy with monopoly and externalities and all kinds of terrible things going on, consumer ignorance, meanwhile has been producing an increase in human scope by a factor of 25 or 30 or higher? So there's a kind of strangeness about this claim that all things are really imperfect. And my scientific... Well, that's a scientific criticism of the argument, but the other scientific criticism is that they don't measure it. Surprisingly, since economists are, as Edmund Burke said, economists and calculators are well known in the culture as being quantitative. But they're not.August Baker: No, they're not. You're right.Deirdre McCloskey: Their quantification is phony in all kinds of ways.August Baker: I thought that was pastime. Yeah, go ahead.Deirdre McCloskey: I've done books and articles up the kazoo on the technique. They're called tests of statistical significance. Correlation, R square, E tests, anything you want to call it. And it's just nonsense. It's the belief, which if we were to say about words, we would know it's false, the belief that numbers have their own interpretation, that inside a number is its meaning. And that would be like saying the American constitution has of 1789 has inside it its own interpretation, which is ridiculous. Everyone agrees on that. They don't get that the same is true of numbers. So anyway, there are all kinds of assertions of Krugman and so on, shows all their imperfections, and they're informationally symmetries and blah, blah, blah.And in some fields, like environmental studies, there are serious attempts to measure it. The advantage in those fields is the economists are sitting right beside people who actually do measure things, like climatologists. So they're led to actually do quantitative science in that field, and in agricultural economics, the economists are serious about magnitudes. And that's, again, because they're right next door to agronomists and practical farmers who want to know how big is big. But in many other fields, like this informationally symmetry stuff or monopolies increasing their monopolies. Google is a monopoly. It's complete nonsense and it's silly. And it's not backed by numbers. So I think that's a major scientific failure for a field that claims to be a policy science. I wish it wouldn't, but claims to be a policy science, and I'm from economics, and I'm going to run your life from now on.August Baker: Right.Deirdre McCloskey: If a doctor came to you and said, "Well, I'm going to bleed you because I think that's what you need," and had no evidence at all that bleeding was good for you, I would run from doctors.August Baker: Sure. Yeah. One of these quotes that I love, you're right, "Mostly in economic theory, it has sufficed to show the mere direction of an imperfection on a blackboard. The quantitative theorems recommended by Samuelson in 1941, and then await the telephone call from the Swedish Academy early on a Monday in early October."Deirdre McCloskey: I could attach names.August Baker: Irreverence.Deirdre McCloskey: If you wanted me to be really mean, I could tell you the economists for whom that is true.August Baker: Right. No, I don't. I'm not as brave as you. But I did want to ask you... Well, first of all, two things, and I think this comes from Rhetoric of Economics, but I might be wrong. If we're trying to understand economists, then we would say, "Well, it's not that..." Well, okay. Why is this? It's because what are economists doing, academic economists, what are they doing? They're trying to self-actualize, they're trying to do interesting things, come up with interesting ideas. And that's what other economists find interesting, ar these.Deirdre McCloskey: Yeah, that's true.August Baker: And that's what journal editors want. And you might also say there's a little prestige in measuring. I don't know.Deirdre McCloskey: Yeah, there is. Oh, boy is there. It was amazing that Simon Kuznets actually got the Nobel Prize. Yeah, that's right. There's a little prestige because of a absurd idea that economists have about physics, which since the war, everyone admires for the second one, because they think, "Well, there are these people called theoretical physicists who do a lot of math, so that must be what I could do as an economist. I'll just sit here and make up theorems," as though they're in the math department. And the other reason this happens is that economists, when they take math courses, take them from mathematicians.August Baker: That was a good point also.Deirdre McCloskey: They don't take them from engineers or physicists meteorologists or other people who use math. And this is not really how physics operates. The theoretical physicists are disdained who don't propose quantitative measures. And necessarily, the theorist makes them now. They hand that over to another group of physicists. But I was at a conference in South Africa about string theory, and who was the English physicist who ended up in a chair with-August Baker: Hawkings?Deirdre McCloskey: Yeah, Hawkings. He was there. I was within a couple of yards of him listening to his machine talking and so on. He was there, a whole bunch of famous physicists. And then there were these string theorists from Santa Barbara and so forth, and you could tell that the other physicists just hated them because it was all theory. It was airy-fairy, it's the strings. I mean, it's consistent. It's good math. The strings are so small that according to most physicists, there is never going to be a way of testing this hypothesis. Never. So they hated it. And that's the way physicists or geologists. Look, if a geologist proposed a theory of the origin of mountains and didn't have quantitative simulations, so to speak, that showed how big was big, and look, you can see that these plates are moving around, that could raise the Andes.August Baker: Right.Deirdre McCloskey: No one would paying any attention to it, whereas economists who in this airy-fairy way say, "Oh, there's imperfections in the capital market. Trade causes distortion."August Baker: Behavioral finance.Deirdre McCloskey: Behavioral finance is a good case in point because the only test of a financial model is can you make money from it?August Baker: I love that quote in your-Deirdre McCloskey: And if you can't, shut up, go home. The idea that you do econometrics that shows there's a glitch in the foreign exchange market, give me a break.August Baker: Right. Here's from your book, page 60, "When I used to eat lunch daily in the seventies at the Quadrangle Club at the University of Chicago with Merton Miller, Gene Fama, Myron Soles, and Fisher Black, I would hear, without quite grasping it import, that the Journal of Business did not accept tests of statistical significance of an alleged irrationality in the stock market, but would instead demand to see the author's bank account."Deirdre McCloskey: And that's, of course, sensible. And it's true of a lot of things. It's true of art. Show me your painting, I'll evaluate it. You say you're a great artist. Okay, show me. And if it is true, there are payoffs. And to keep asserting that we're going to just do things because numbers have intrinsic meaning is just silly. They have external meaning. When I say the temperature in Washington today is a disappointing 45 degrees, that means something because you can compare it with other numbers.August Baker: So I think that one of the comparisons with physics is when we look at physics, I heard a lecture about this that Daniel Robinson, that we forget how... We know that there are these mathematical laws underlying the natural world, but it wasn't known before Newton.Deirdre McCloskey: Sure.August Baker: But there's this assumption that there must be some mathematical laws underneath the social economy.Deirdre McCloskey: That's right. That's Adam Smith's conviction.August Baker: And that would be an assumption in becoming an economist, that you're going to believe that.Deirdre McCloskey: Yep. And it's got this problem that if you're so smart, why aren't you rich?August Baker: Right.Deirdre McCloskey: We know that there's an inverse square log for gravitation. It doesn't make anyone... There's no profit to be gotten from that because everyone knows it. And when you don't know it, you can't follow a cannonball very well. But when you do know it, then you can derive the parabola of the cannonball. But if there were similar tricks in economics that would aid people to buy low and sell high, they would already be exploited for one thing. And it would be... This is the problem with modern finance. If it were easy to do, then we'd all be multi-billionaires. So there's this big difference. A great economist named Fritz, an Austrian, in 1941 review said, "Imagine what physics would be like or chemistry if molecules could talk to each other. I mean, actually persuade each other to do stuff by saying, no, no. Why don't you not repel me this time because I do love you so much?" This would be very hard to do and would have this deep uncertainty that consciousness and social life creates.August Baker: Right. Yeah. And in fact, once you make a rule and it seems to work, if people find out about it, they'll say, "I'm going to prove it wrong."Deirdre McCloskey: Exactly. Exactly. And if that's an opportunity for profit, it'll happen. Now, I was trained as a transportation economist, and there are some transportation engineering formulas that work. For example, the famous gaper's delay. There's an accident on the left side of the highway, and yet people slow down on the right side to have a look. And that adds up. And you can actually simulate that rather easily and show how long the queue is going to be, how much delay in total there's going to be so there. And I don't deny that there are, what can you say-August Baker: Regularities.Deirdre McCloskey: Important and true regularities such as that if you raise the relative price of something, the quantity demand of it will go down pretty much. And that's true for all kinds of things. And it's not a dumb thing that economists say. It's appropriate. But the idea that you could run an economy, like a machine, like a car, you'll hear an awful lot about the Federal Reserve steering the economy, and it puts on the brake and it puts on the accelerator. And these mysterious people in Washington are doing this, and it's just baloney. They can't do it. They're driving in a dense fog. The instruments are no good, they're not sure what speed they're going. They're not sure if the brake works. The accelerator is very unreliable. The steering wheel doesn't work very well, and they're in a crowd of people. What do you do? Stop the car and get out of it. Stop trying to steer it.August Baker: I guess the counter would be, if we had a case of laissez-faire, really had one, then we could say that's true. But all we really do is have laissez-faire with a substantial government.Deirdre McCloskey: That's true. That's certainly true. We have a massive government. Look, before the First World War sophisticated modern countries, their state took 10% of national income for its purposes at all, from local to federal. Now, in most of these countries, well, for all of them, actually, it's 40% or somewhat higher. In France, it's 57%, actually. And that's in the last century that's gone up. And not only spending, but then they regulate the rest. Childcare is regulated. In the United States, when I was a kid, moms would say, on Saturday, "Go out and play. Come back when the streetlights come on." So we played. And if we wanted to play football, we played football. We didn't have adult supervision.August Baker: Ride your bike.Deirdre McCloskey: We wandered around and we did stuff and learned how to deal with each other. And now, if you do that, child protection will come, the state will intervene and take your child away from you. So even childcare is now under strict state supervision. I think it's terrible. And I wish we could get... You have to have some state. I don't disagree with that, but it doesn't have to be this leviathan.August Baker: Right.Deirdre McCloskey: James Robinson and Daron Acemoglu write books in favor of the leviathan, and they keep saying that bigger and bigger state, such as we have now, and getting even bigger is good for, shockingly, they say for liberty, by which they mean, Mama and Papa State will take care of you. I assure you, they'll be nice parents.August Baker: So therefore you can-Deirdre McCloskey: Therefore, just allow yourself to be a child. Go back to being a child in your household, and that's fine. You'll be happy as a lark. Not like a lark, more like a worm.August Baker: Let me go now to some of these great nuggets. I've always felt that Friedman's The Methodology of Positive Economics, well, everyone can criticize it. I really have always thought that it captured a lot of what economists do or the way they think.Deirdre McCloskey: Or what they think they're doing, at least.August Baker: The idea to me, from what I recall, was that you're supposed to make assumptions which are contrary to reality. That's what a good assumption is. So then how would you judge a good assumption? It's based on what other economists find is an interesting assumption.Deirdre McCloskey: Yeah. But if that's all, then we're back to a bad aspect of the Rhetoric of Economics, where the kind of academic agreement that, well, we're going to suppose there are tremendous imperfections in a modern economy, and so we need state intervention on a massive scale. That just gets assumed as the basis for public policy, as Milton would say, without serious inquiry. Milton was an empiricist. He was not much of a theorist, to tell the truth.August Baker: Yeah, I understand that.Deirdre McCloskey: He was a fact guy and he kept wanting to test things. Now, I think some of his tests were silly, and some of them were wonderful. His greatest book is a book called A Theory of the Consumption Function, which he wrote in the 1950s. And no economist can read that book without knowing that he's in the presence of a master.August Baker: Yeah.Deirdre McCloskey: It's extraordinary book. And it's got some theory, but mainly it's got, okay, now let's see, cross section savings rate and time series savings rate. What's going on here? They're not the same. And so he was an empiricist.August Baker: Well, this is the quote I wanted to get at, the sort of gossip. You say that... You refer to The Methodology of Positive Economics, 1953. You say, "A paper Friedman told me that he later regretted." I wanted to ask you about that.Deirdre McCloskey: Yeah. I have it somewhere in my files. I'm going to be going... Having moved, I had to move all my files, because we didn't have time to go through them and throw most of them away. But there is a letter in some file. I've shown it to some people, but it hasn't got into the public sphere very much. It's not that I'm secretive about it. It's there somewhere. Where he wrote to me when I had sent out a... I guess it was after the publication of the original article on The Rhetoric of Economics that Milton wrote to me and said, "I agree with what you say mostly. And I have regretted doing that methodological paper." His lifetime enemy, they didn't hate each other or anything, but opponent is a better word, Paul Samuelson, had the same methodology and wrote at the same time, circa 1950, wrote in favor of this kind of methodology.August Baker: Right.Deirdre McCloskey: Paul Anthony Samuelson, by the way, was my mother's longtime mixed doubles tennis partner. A fact that everyone should know.August Baker: Yes. No, it's important. How did that happen?Deirdre McCloskey: Well, they were in the same tennis club. I didn't know Samuelson.August Baker: Okay.Deirdre McCloskey: I think when I was undergraduate, he came to Adams house and I heard him talk to us. But yeah, that's all I ever knew of Samuelson. But my parents were close friends of him and Marion, his first wife.August Baker: Interesting. Then the last part I wanted to get to were some of these things that you say that one is not supposed to say. I'll just read off some of them.Deirdre McCloskey: I'm in Washington, and the great Washington hostess of an earlier generation, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, had a pillow on her settee embroidered with, "If you haven't got anything nice to say about anyone, come and sit beside me."August Baker: I love it. All right. "I await testing refutations, but it seems to me on the basis of existing empirical studies," and I won't read all of them, but some of them, "that the following propositions are factually true, inequality since 1800 has fallen, not risen." Another one, "Imperialism was not profitable for the countries conquering others."Deirdre McCloskey: Yeah.August Baker: "Unemployment is caused as much by government interference, such as interference in the wage bargain as it is by inherent flaws in market economies." Here's one, "That consumers are irrational does not imply that markets are."Deirdre McCloskey: Yep.August Baker: "China and India broke out of the vicious and allegedly unbreakable cycle of poverty. Foreign aid has not saved the poor of the world, but has enriched elites and financed impoverishing projects." And then the last one, "Global warming is a... Or the last one I'll mention, "Global warming is a crisis, but not an existential one."Deirdre McCloskey: Yeah. I think all those are true, and there's a lot of evidence for each of them. I could go... You can choose one and I'll at least be able to refer to.August Baker: Yeah. How about the global warming? Can you do that?Deirdre McCloskey: Well, the most famous calculation within the little group of economists about this is one that Bill Nordhaus at Yale did, where he pointed out that if income per head continues to grow at the rate that it is now and has been for 40 or 50 years, as the World Bank, for example, thinks it is, about 2% a year, if that's the case, then in a century, income per head in the United States, I mean in the world, in the world now, will be four times what it is now in the United States. And there's no good reason from a technological point of view that that can't go on happening. Some people say, "Oh, we've made all the inventions we can." Bob Gordon says this, and I don't believe it. But anyway, suppose. In that case, the reduction of income from bad climate will, for one thing, have millions, billions of engineers working on it, engineers and entrepreneurs from this immensely enriched world. And the hurt will reduce income, what, 20%?August Baker: Fascinating.Deirdre McCloskey: Well, out of 400%, 20% is not that much. So this idea that we're doomed and so on is not terribly plausible. Now, look, I'm not a climate scientist. But I do know, as everyone knows that looks into it at all, that these climate models are very uncertain. And that doesn't mean they're stupid or shouldn't be done, or these people are liars, but it does mean that we can't panic and do terrible things that impoverish the world now. We should probably have a certain optimism about the enriching world that we face if we don't screw it up. Now, we're very good at screwing it up, so maybe we will. If we follow the advice of Swedish schoolgirls instead of very wise, 80-year-old economic historians we're going to get in trouble.August Baker: There you go. I'm with on that. Well, Professor Deirdre Nansen McCloskey, Beyond Positivism, Behaviorism and Neoinstitutionalism in Economics, and a lot of other great books, including the great Rhetoric of Economics, it's been such a pleasure to speak to you today. Thank you so much for joining me.Deirdre McCloskey: Thank you. I've enjoyed it. I love speaking to philosophers. It often gives me a headache, but I love...August Baker: There's a lot of similarities between economics and philosophy, really.Deirdre McCloskey: There are. And some of them are not too flattering to the economists. There's this phrase that Bob Heilbroner made famous, worldly philosophers.August Baker: Yes.Deirdre McCloskey: And that's right. We are worldly philosophers. Sometimes we're too much philosophers and not enough worldly.August Baker: No, I remember in the worldly philosophers, he was speaking about how he came up with that word. It was going to be the money philosophers or something. And his editor said, "Worldly. That's the word you want." Perfect.Deirdre McCloskey: Yeah. Well, I became an economist because of that book.August Baker: Interesting.Deirdre McCloskey: I was a history major, and I found that as a history major, you had to read a lot of tiresome long books. And I found this very irritating.August Baker: Well, you said-Deirdre McCloskey: And now I write boring, long books.August Baker: Right. No, not boring at all, fascinating.Deirdre McCloskey: But still, I look, and my father was in government at Harvard. That's political science. So I couldn't do that. That would've been a natural major for me.August Baker: Right, right.Deirdre McCloskey: I think Dad even told me, "No, you can't major in government." So I said, "Oh, well." Over the summer after freshman year, I read Bob's book and it just fascinated me. And ever since, I've been in love with economics. Then I tried to use the book, and of course, I went back to it, this is, I don't know, 40 years later. But gee, maybe I should assign it in my... I was assigned to teach the history of economic thought, which I hadn't done. So that was nice. So I looked at Bob's book and it's terrible.August Baker: Yeah. It didn't age well.Deirdre McCloskey: It's not good history. It's not good intellectual history. It's very bad. It's charming and well-written. But I grew to admire Bob on other grounds. For example, and this is one test I use, he was smooth as silk about my gender change. No problem. So was Milton Friedman, for that [inaudible 00:53:26] Rose.August Baker: Of course. Yeah. I would've expected that. Right.Deirdre McCloskey: That's right, but even from Bob. And Bob, late in his life said, "Capitalism has won." He said, "Look, if you want to have a rich country, you better adopt capitalism." Now, as you know, in orthodox Marxism, that's actually orthodox Marxism.August Baker: Right.Deirdre McCloskey: That the fruit of the bourgeois era will be taken by the dictatorship of the proletariat and the withering of the state. And then we'll have this wonderful anarchist situation. But you need to go through the capitalism.August Baker: Right.Deirdre McCloskey: But still, he was a charming man.August Baker: Yeah. No, I thought it was interesting that you listed him among your favorites. And also that you talked about wishing you had worked at the new school since he did. Not because of that, but...Deirdre McCloskey: The reason for that is that new school kids don't learn what we called in Chicago price theory.August Baker: Price theory, yeah.Deirdre McCloskey: So Mariana Mazzucato is a completely incompetent economist because she doesn't know supply and demand. Now, you can be a Marxist and know supply and demand. I know people that do who are, and that's fine.August Baker: Right. Sure.Deirdre McCloskey: I don't blame David Harvey because he doesn't claim to be an economist, but Mazzucato does.August Baker: Well, thank you so much for speaking with me. It's really been a pleasure.Deirdre McCloskey: Okay, dear.August Baker: I'm a big fan of yours for a long time.Deirdre McCloskey: Thank you very... Well, don't be a fan. Send money.August Baker: I buy the books. That's something.Deirdre McCloskey: Buy the books. Buy the books. Okay, dear.August Baker: Goodbye.Deirdre McCloskey: Bye-bye.  

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