Welcome to the Quilette Podcast. I'm your host Iona Italia, the managing editor at

Quilette. Quilette is where free thought lives. We are an independent grassroots platform for heterodox ideas and fearless

commentary. If you'd like to support the podcast, you can do so by going to Kooltt.com and becoming a paid subscriber.

The subscription will also give you access to all our articles and early access to

Quilett social events.

My guest today is the philosopher Oliver Traldy.

Oliver is a postdoctoral fellow at the James Madison Program at Princeton University and an incoming professor at the Honors College of the University of Tulsa.

I talked to Oliver about his recent book Political Beliefs, a Philosophical Introduction, published by Reutler University Press.

Oliver has chosen to forego royalty payments in exchange for permission to make his book freely available online.

So I encourage you all to go and look it up and you can download or read it online.

Oliver and I discussed a number of philosophical questions with implications for everyone who is keenly interested in politics.

What do we mean when we describe something as political?

How do we form our political beliefs?

Why do those views tend to cluster around certain anchoring beliefs?

Is the marketplace of ideas a good metaphor for the way in which we arrive at political opinions?

Why is politics so adversarial and is that a good thing?

How does identity figure into this?

And most importantly of all, why should we take an interest in politics at all?

I hope you enjoy Oliver's thoughtful musings on these and other topics amid a wide-ranging

conversation.

I'm going to start Oliver by reading a passage about your book,

and then I think we should start by getting into the central question which is what makes a

...