526. Beyond Problem Solving: Philosophy and the Quest for Understanding feat. Agnes Callard

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What are ‘untimely questions’ and why do they become common blind spots in philosophy? Why is philosophy a team sport?? How does Moore’s paradox highlight the differences between truth and belief?

Agnes Callard is a professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago and the author of the books Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life, Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming, The Case Against Travel, and On Anger.

Greg and Agnes discuss the essence of living a philosophical life through the Socratic method. Agnes emphasizes inquiry, human interaction, and rigorous thinking as processes that require effort and dialogue. Their discussion touches on the distinctions between problem-solving and questioning, the complexities of human preferences, and the societal tendency to convert deep philosophical questions into more manageable problems.

Callard also reflects on philosophical engagement within various contexts, including education, relationships, and ethical frameworks. The episode highlights the value of philosophical inquiry not just as an academic pursuit but as a fundamental part of living a meaningful life.

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Episode Quotes:

Philosophy concerns itself with problems not questions

05:41: I think philosophy concerns itself not with problems, but with questions. Where the thing that you actually want is the answer to the question, and you're not trying to answer the question so that you can get on with something else that you were doing anyway. That's what you were doing—you were on a quest. And both problem-solving and question-answering are, kinesis, in Aristotle’s sense? They're emotions; they're processes. So they're similar in that way, but t hey're different in that, with a question, there's a sense in which the process leads to a sort of self-culmination, where the answer to the question kind of is the culmination of the process of questioning. And it's—we can almost say—you really fully understand the question when you have the answer, so that there's a kind of internal relationship between the question and the answer. Whereas, with problem-solving, anything that gets the problem out of the way is fine. You don't need a deep understanding of the problem. Like, if you were trying to move the boulder and someone else is like, "Look, you could just go around it," then that'll be fine.

Philosophical training means simulating an opponent

29:27: What philosophical training is, is training in simulating an interlocutor who objects to you—right? That's what you do in philosophy.

What gets you to the top won’t always keep you there

33:38: I think answering requires less training than asking; it requires less kind of experience in philosophical activity. And so Socrates had to relegate himself to the Socrates role because he was dealing with a bunch of people who didn't know how to do philosophy yet.

Why the Socratic approach matters in philosophy

39:54: Your philosophical, ethical system is going to constrain how you live your life. That's kind of the whole point of an ethical system. But I do think that the Socratic approach is one that can be inflected as a way of doing—a lot of what you were doing in your life. The Socratic approach says, do all that same stuff inquisitively. Now, there may be some things you can't do inquisitively—don't do those things. Or it may be that there are some things that you can't do inquisitively, but you simply have to do them to survive or something—like, as long as they're not unjust, that's fine. But the thought is like, well, let's take romance or something. Let's take politics. Let's take death, right? So those are the three areas I talk about. Can you be a philosopher and be doing those things? And Socrates, I think, goes out of his way to try to say, yes, that is, it's not just that those things can be done philosophically, but they're done best philosophically.

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