What It’s Like to Be a Philosopher: Barry Lam

The APA blog is working with Cliff Sosis of What is it Like to Be a Philosopher? in publishing advance excerpts from Cliff’s long-form interviews with philosophers.

The following is an edited excerpt from the forthcoming interview with Barry Lam which will be released in full next week.

Hey Barry! Thanks for doing this. Did you consider doing anything other than philosophy?

I think by the end of my second year of college I had decided that the only path for me was to become an academic; I was choosing between English and Philosophy and decided on Philosophy because I liked the rigor and standards, and because a lot of the graduate students in English that were teaching me at the time seemed to be doing a kind of scholarship and thinking that I couldn’t really relate to.

Inspirational teachers?

I had a lot of inspirational teachers in college. Almost everyone in Humanities Core inspired me. It was the first time I ever saw people like professors, knowledgeable, intelligent, analytical, erudite, and proud of it, flaunting it, I didn’t know people like that existed, or made a living at being that way. Think about it from my perspective; the smartest guy I ever encountered up until then was Dr. Drew!

Job market advice?

I actually wrote a guide a few years ago about how to prepare yourself on the job market if you’re interested in liberal arts colleges. The most important piece of advice: Be prepared to talk about pedagogy and your choices on a sample syllabi, and the more specific the better. For the job market as a whole, I wouldn’t add anything that other people haven’t already said; people who are hiring are looking at hundreds of applications at the early stages, and at any stage, they are not looking for reasons to hire you, they are looking for any reason to cut that stack to a manageable size. As a result, don’t take rejections as indications of your worthiness or merit. Other than that, take the earliest interview on the calendar you can get, and the earliest time in the day you can get. People are nicer when they’re fresher.

How’d the world change when you were in grad school?

The biggest technological change in graduate school was that it was the birth of social media. Everyone started on Friendster early in graduate school, and then graduated to Facebook by the end of it. Everyone was watching Homestar Runner during graduate school, and by the end of it, YouTube was beginning. Oh, and blogs started in graduate school, so really my generation went through the beginnings of all this digital communications as young adults.

Speaking of the internet and social media, what do you make of the philosophy blogosphere, or philosophy on the internet, in general? Pros? Cons?

It’s funny, I’ve never thought about whether I had an opinion about this stuff. As I’m thinking about it, it occurs to me that if philosophy didn’t have the blogosphere that it did, with all of its idiosyncrasies and toxic elements, it would make me think that the field was really old fashioned. In fact, there may be certain aspects of philosophy on the internet that is behind other fields; for instance, there’s no Andrew Gelman or Tyler Cowen for philosophy, at least as those blogs relate to a lot of people outside of their respective fields. I know there is a lot of gossip and squabbling and piling on happens very quickly, all the cyber mobbing is terrible, it shouldn’t happen. But if a lot of the internet were doing that and philosophy wasn’t, I would think there’s something wrong with our field, like we’re not part of any meaningful conversation worth having nasty disputes about. Gelman and Cowen are very popular not just because of the value of their contributions, but because statistics and economics are very prominent in the way people think about a lot of things in the world. Its good for philosophy if we’re in the mix there. I mean, is there a Classics blogosphere/internet culture, and if so, are there any controversies there we’ve heard about? Doesn’t speak all that well about Classics. All the toxic social elements to it are just part of the world figuring out how to be on the internet, I don’t think its a problem with philosophy per se.

When did you start thinking about doing public philosophy? What’s the origin story of Hi-Phi nation. First episode idea? Was getting the project off the ground difficult? How do you finance it? Do you have help? How has the mission of the show evolved?

As early as 2011 or so I started thinking that there really should be a “This American Life” for philosophy. I came back from a day-long invited conference at West Point some time in 2012 with the idea for what eventually became Soldier Philosophers from season 1. But then I came up for tenure, had a baby, and life got in the way and I set it all aside. When I was up for my first post-tenure sabbatical in Fall 2015, I decided to set all of my academic writing aside, which was something like 5 papers, and picked up the idea I had in 2012. I bought a case full of recording equipment, drove down to West Point, and went from there. 1 year later I had a full-year paid fellowship at Duke University to produce the first season of the show. I moved the whole family down to Durham and mapped out most of the season in the fall. I had my salary and benefits paid for by the fellowship plus $5000 from Duke, and $6000 from the NEH, so I used it to pay for all the hosting and any other fees that go with setting up a website, podcast, etc. etc. But all of that is minimal. The real costly thing is my time. After I finished making the first season, I decided that I wanted to keep doing it, and then the show sort of took off that summer. I took unpaid course releases at Vassar this past year so I could spend some time producing the show. I ended up with 10 episodes over 10 months, but that didn’t really work out too well for listenership growth so this year I’m going back to producing a stack of episodes and releasing in a closer schedule.

Nice. How much time does it take to produce an episode, on average?

It takes 2-3 month per episode from start to finish. Some episodes I’ve worked on for up to 6 months, but none have come together in less than 2.

How has the show evolved?

The mission of the show hasn’t changed, it is still a story-driven show about philosophy to show how contemporary philosophy intersects with stories from everyday life, law, history, science, and the arts. I’m hoping to develop the show in such a way that I can expand the idea beyond what is strictly called philosophy in the academy. There is a lot of theoretical work in other fields that I think is just as interesting.

Cool. Top 3 episodes, in your mind?

My favorite three episodes are Season 1, Episode 1: Wishes of the Dead, Episode 4: The Name of God, and Season 2, Episode 5: Cover me Softly. Philosophers seem to like like Cover Me Softly the best.

It seems like there is a schism between public and academic philosophy.  Why is that? How do we bridge the gap? Negative unintended consequences? 

Some public philosophy isn’t that different from academic philosophy. Some of it is just academic philosophy written for op-ed pages. This is true of some books as well. Some public philosophy is academic philosophers taking their ideas and training and communicating it using more accessible language, which is great. In fact, probably if you ask the public about philosophers they’ve heard of, they’ll mention some superstar academic philosopher who has turned into a public philosopher.

Where there is a schism, I’m just going to go with the boring Marxist analysis and say that academic philosophy is produced under very distinctive material circumstances, and the culture that has arisen around those material circumstances very much drive its development in predictable ways. People are going to produce the kind of work that gets them jobs, publications in certain journals, promotions, invitations to conferences, talks, editorial boards, collaborations, and so forth. That work looks a certain way, reads a certain way, and develops in a certain way. There’s just no way, statistically, that most professional philosophers are going to be some groundbreaking agenda-setter who bucks the materially incentivized trends and produces work that looks nothing like the rest of the field. This is probably a good thing. But if you look at public-facing philosophy, the material circumstances are just so different. For the longest time, and I think this is still true for a lot of people and places, people who do public-facing work are ridiculed within their fields in academia. They face charges of charlatanism. It’s very much still the case that the work doesn’t count within academia for hiring, tenure, or promotion.

Favorite philosophy stuff in the same ballpark as Hi-Phi nation? Favorite non-philosophy podcasts?

This is a golden age of audio storytelling. More than half the world doesn’t know it, or doesn’t care, maybe they don’t process the spoken word the same way. The other half can’t keep up because there’s so much good stuff out there, and can’t go to the toilet without having a podcast to listen to. The shows that are in the same ballpark as mine aren’t philosophy shows, but shows in other fields, like Invisibilia (psychology), Freakonomics Radio (economics), Uncivil, and Backstory (History). The other good philosophy shows are a very different format, either lectures, discussion, or interview shows, like History of Philosophy without any Gaps, Elucidations, Philosophy Bites, Very Bad Wizards, Partially Examined Life. Outside of academic-oriented shows, my favorite shows are Love + Radio, I loved both seasons of Slow Burn, Rough Translation, and Heavyweight. There are the usual suspects, This American Life, Radiolab, Reply All.

Love Freakonomics. Peter Adamson does a really great job with History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps. Advice for people starting a podcast?

If you want to start a podcast, the first thing to do is to start a podcast. Record something and see what its like to interview, listen, and edit. From there, buy some nicer microphones, learn about sound-treatment to reduce reverb, and get a good digital audio workstation to edit with. I’ve helped a lot of people start podcasts and the biggest barrier is just starting.

How do you see the future of philosophy?

There is a trend I see at the moment toward variations of what you might call “woke philosophy”. Its metaphysics, epistemology, moral philosophy, philosophy of language, usually highly abstract topics, where people build highly theoretical machinery to codify or justify various public practices that are considered to be morally obligatory. For instance, you might construct a theory of belief and justification that denies the rationality of using statistical evidence in making up one’s mind about someone on the basis of race and gender data. I think this is going to be very prominent in the near future. I see a lot of young people doing it and I think we’re going to see a lot of it in the next 10 years as younger people publish, get tenure, and become the mid-career people in the field.

Any trends you find troubling?

As for disconcerting trends, I think the future of philosophy is going to be one of wide inequality, mirroring the growing wealth inequality in the country. Institutions that are flooded with money will have vibrant research departments, with well-paid and comfortable philosophers who will be, as they always have been, leaders in their research areas, but who have very little incentive to be leaders in bringing more equity and accessibility to the field as a whole. Meanwhile, the places where 90% of college students get their education will have small or non-existent philosophy departments, with underpaid and overworked adjuncts teaching an uninspiring curriculum with multiple-choice tests, leading to even further declines in enrollment.

I think this is going to show up in research as well. With inequality you are going to get younger people and people trying to move up concentrating their attention on the work of those at the top, leaving very little room and attention for outsiders, innovators, cranks, or those in the bottom 90%. We’re going to see large and increasingly pedantic literatures on a small set of topics at a time. This isn’t new, it’s the way philosophy has always been, but its going to be amplified. I think its great that top departments are getting even more money to make their departments bigger and better. But I’m about as convinced in trickle-down philosophy as I am in trickle-down economics.

Best philosopher you disagree with most?

Peter Unger. I love reading principled hard liners, maybe because I’m not one.

Most underated philosopher?

My friend Brett Sherman. His stuff is always clever and systematic.

Favorite philosopher?

Too many. Classically, Hume. People I’ve never failed to enjoy reading include Roy Sorensen, David Christensen, and Judy Thompson.

[interviewer: Cliff Sosis]

This interview has been edited for length. The full interview will be available at What Is It Like to Be A Philosopher?  

You can get early access to the interview and help support the project here.