Friction, a philosophy channel featuring interviews of professional philosophers, recently released a supercut of three dozen thinkers answering the question “What is the value of philosophy?”
Watch archived video on YouTube
Included in the video are responses from Jonathan Schaffer (00:00), Timothy Williamson (01:34), Michael Slote (06:11), Alex Rosenberg (09:18), Benjamin Mitchell-Yellin (10:17), Susanna Siegel (14:36), Frank Jackson (18:08), Stanley Fish (21:45), Benj Hellie (25:33), Arif Ahmed (31:12), Joshua Rasmussen (33:57), Christopher Peacocke (35:58), Eric Sampson (36:42), Terence Horgan (27:52), Michael Huemer (41:08), Owen Flanagan (44:08), Brian Bix (46:33), Mark Balaguer (48:15), Paul Weirich (51:04), Roy Sorensen (52:35), Don Loeb (54:47), Michael Walzer (56:54), Alex Worsnip (1:00:22), Pete Mandik (1:04:24), Manuel Vargas (1:12:37), Tyler Burge (1:17:10), Linda Zagzebski (1:22:54), Christopher Kaczor (1:24:58), Avery Archer (1:26:09), Brian Skyrms (1:30:47), Herman Cappelen (1:31:38), Tim Maudlin (1:36:58), Barbara Partee (1:40:54), Manuel Garcia-Carpintero (1:47:59), Steven Pinker (1:58:10), and Kendall Walton (2:01:49).
You can support Friction’s interview work here.
UPDATE (12/3/22): In the comments below and elsewhere online there has been some criticism about the demographic make-up of this set of interviewees (mostly men, mostly white, mostly English-as-a-first-language, etc.) and criticism of me for not discussing the video’s lack of diversity in the original post. What happened is that I learned about this video, watched a little, thought it asked an interesting question of interesting people and that Daily Nous readers would agree with that assessment, and put it up on the site. I did this via my phone because the day before, I mysteriously got logged out of DN on my computer, could not log back into it on any computer, but strangely could still work on the site via my phone. You may not know this but for various reasons it takes me about 10 times longer to create posts on my phone than on a computer. In the realm of “stuff that when it comes down to it admittedly is not all that important,” it is really a sizable pain in the ass. Still, I put up four posts for you folks yesterday. [Pausing for a moment now until the applause dies down.] Anyway, now that I have (again, mysteriously) regained access to my site on my computer, I can respond to these criticisms. I have four words for my critics: holy shit, you’re right.
This video is full of fascinating answers to a question that’s important to philosophers. I think it’s great that someone conducted these interviews and put this supercut together, and it’s great that so many philosophers and others agreed to be interviewed. But between my excitement about it and my rushing against my technical problems, I missed the demographic imbalance. Had I noticed it, I still would have posted the video, but I would have included something like this, too: “I hope Friction’s interview series continues to grow and comes to includes a wider diversity of philosophers who can be featured in future editions of compilations like this one.” After all, as many readers know, I’m a fan of diversity in philosophy. So, thanks for the criticism, readers.
