Hello, everyone. I'm Stephen West. This is Philosophize This. Patreon.com slash Philosophize This.

Philosophical writing on Substackhead Philosophize This on there. I hope you love the show today.

So in Chapter 7 of Alastair McIntyre's book, The Tas of Philosophy, he asks us to imagine

a scene of a few friends that decide they're going to get together one day. They're sitting at a

table and a diner,

ordering food, having a very normal conversation. He says, imagine if in this moment one of the people speaks up and they ask their friends, what is the real point of even existing? Why shouldn't

we all just give up on trying to do anything when we're in this world? You know, a philosophical

question. The other people at the table hear this person, and they understandably feel a little uncomfortable having to answer it. Maybe one of them feels embarrassed to even have to talk about something so personal. Maybe to another friend, this is the very kind of question they're constantly trying to find ways to avoid. It's an abrasive moment, this moment in the diners, what I'm saying, but the McIntyre asks us to imagine a different scene side by side with this one. Now imagine there's a philosopher who's standing up in front of a room of other philosophers at a seminar among academics. Imagine they ask the exact same content of the question, but maybe in this case they ask it in a way that's filtered through terms and language that are common within the field of philosophy.

Well, when it's asked at the seminar, nobody in that room even bats an eyelash at the question. Nobody's uncomfortable there. So how come in one moment this question's taken as something that's a challenge to the very existence of the people that hear it? But in the other moment, nothing. To Alistair, once you know the answer to this question, he thinks he'll realize two things that are very important about the world you live in. One has to do with how philosophy has changed under the encyclopedic view that we have of things. And two is something deeply important about the university as a modern institution that he thinks deserves a lot of criticism for the kinds of thinkers that regularly produces. We'll get to all that he has to say about it by the end of this episode, but I think it's helpful to first clarify the scene in the diner a bit more. See, to McIntyre, the reason the people in the diner reacted so differently to the people in the seminar is because in the diner, this is a real, difficult question that's being asked of a real person about the stakes of their actual life on this planet. I mean, you ask a philosophical question in this way,

and there's just going to be a certain number of people brave enough to take it seriously.

And there's going to be a certain number of those people that have a full-blown existential event

because they heard it. A sort of, where did my life go wedding reception that I go to with myself?

It's understandable. But he says contrasts that with the philosophical seminar where in today's academy,

it often takes the form of reducing philosophy into something like a professional technical skill.

Now, to be clear, this is a skill that is navigated brilliantly by seasoned

experts that are extensively trained in their field. No one's denying that. But his point is that

this whole attitude of thinking of philosophy as a technical skill often separates the people

that are doing philosophy from the deeper questions that gave anyone a reason to care about

philosophy in the first place.

To get started explaining his point here, let me just say that philosophy, at bottom for McIntyre, always begins with some sort of a rift or a tension within a real human experience.

Meaning, for all of recorded history, the questions that we ask in philosophy have not been

magically created out of abstractions

...