The Elucidations Podcast: Philosophy Outside Academia

I completed my PhD in philosophy at the University of Chicago in 2015 (on generic statements, in case anyone is interested), and I currently teach linguistics and philosophy of language to freshmen at the University of Chicago as part of their Humanities Core program.

I’ve been hosting and producing a philosophy podcast since 2009, in which I ask contemporary authors to explain the core arguments at play in their latest work. My guests, co-hosts, and I strive to do a number of things. One simple goal is to provide a quick answer to the question, ‘what do philosophers actually do?’ (Who in the profession hasn’t been asked that question at a party?) Having a digestible audio presentation of what philosophers are working on provides me with a simple answer: listen to the Elucidations podcast and find out!

And there’s more to it than just having a quick comeback. The popular perception of philosophy, at least in the US, is that it essentially consists of getting high with your friends while you all blow each other’s minds by observing that dude, there is no spoon. We aren’t really sure what philosophy is, but whatever it is, it is most likely some form of self-involved navel-gazing. Meanwhile, no one outside of the field knows about how Saul Kripke’s relational semantics for modal logic allowed us to rigorously explore the parallels between moral obligation and physical necessity, or how the Curry-Howard-Tait correspondence showed us that math proofs were fundamentally the same thing as computer programs, or how Rae Langton got us to see that our conversational interactions could be the very medium through which oppression happens. (Insert your favorite examples of great philosophy here—those are just a few drawn at random from my areas of interest.) The only way to combat popular misconceptions of what philosophy is is to make philosophy readily accessible to everyone, regardless of how much money or how many fancy degrees they happen to be packing. Real philosophy—philosophy that you can hear, feel, and react to with your mind.

The Elucidations podcast also seeks to be a resource for those of us who are in the discipline. Right now, professional philosophers in the US are under strong institutional pressure to spend their 35-year careers pigeonholing themselves into specialities that seem to be getting narrower by an order of magnitude with every passing moment. There’s nothing wrong, of course, with wanting to understand a specific topic in as much detail as you possibly can. The impulse to conduct an investigation in a modular, piecemeal fashion is perfectly commendable in and of itself. But the trouble arises when we aspire (or, if Agnes Callard is right, when we think we aspire) to know as little as possible about our colleagues’ breakthroughs. There’s a glimmer of pride that passes over a lot of professors’ eyes when they intone those magic words: I don’t know anything about X because my area is Y. It’s a sign of an irrational pathology that tells you your knowledge of one area is enhanced by your ignorance of another. If that impulse is allowed to go unchecked, we may be looking at a future in which the profession has turned into an army of unreflective pencil pushers, each capable of performing at most one intellectual task and all assembled into one massive, soulless bureaucracy. I don’t know about you, but that certainly isn’t the future I want.

Luckily, there is a growing contingent of professional philosophers who don’t want that future either. They pursue their research with all the seriousness one could hope for, while taking special care to cultivate a sense of curiosity about how their work interfaces with everyone else’s. The happy alternative future they are building is one in which the profession matures into a community of well-rounded intellectuals who have a clear role to play in the broader culture.

And yet, even with the best of intentions, one can find it difficult to stay abreast of what is happening in the field, or in other fields. Philosophy papers take a while to read, and especially for junior faculty, tenure clock time is a limited resource. This is where I believe that podcasts have a small but important contribution to make to disciplinary insiders. They allow you to get a glimpse of what other intelligent people are thinking about, all during those portions of the day that are already spoken for, like when you’re washing dishes, vacuuming, driving to work, or waiting for the bus. They provide a quick lay of the land, and sometimes even a detailed sketch of an argument. Ultimately, they supply a basis from which to embark on the kind of deep dive into the library stacks that people with PhDs are all about doing. You don’t need to fly anywhere, you don’t need a research account, you don’t need to be on sabbatical, you don’t have to pay an entry fee, you don’t need to sort through childcare logistics, you don’t have to have gotten your graduate degree from a top 5 program or your undergraduate degree from an Ivy, and you don’t need your university library to have purchased an electronic license. All you need is internet access.

Over the past few years, there has been an incredible boom in educational material on the internet. Want to learn about graph theory? Sarada Herke’s YouTube lectures will give you as serious an introduction to the topic as you can get from any university course. I think that philosophers have a great opportunity here to move some of their teaching and research into a space where it can have a substantial impact. And when I say substantial impact, I mean it. There are now political talk shows on YouTube which, by some estimates, pull in more viewers than CNN. Wouldn’t it be great if philosophy could get even a fraction of that level of exposure? Don’t you think philosophy departments would be less at risk of getting shut down due to budget cuts if one or two normal people had a clue what philosophy was? Don’t you think it would be just a little bit harder for political blowhards to compare us unfavorably to welders if the public at large could get a glimpse of everything the discipline has to offer? I do.

There are many reasons to be hopeful. Rachel McKinnon, Irami Osei-Frimpong, and John Corvino deserve special mention for making inroads in the YouTube space. Peter Adamson, Jonardon Ganeri, and Chike Jeffers have succeeded in creating what is easily the most in-depth resource ever on the history of philosophy, released both as a podcast and as a series of books. Myisha Cherry, Toby Buckle, and Mark Linsenmayer have consistently produced excellent podcast content, and Barry Lam is taking his philosophy podcast into unprecedented prime-time territory. I have no doubt there are others whose work I should know about but don’t. What I would really like to see, over the next decade or so, is an effort to consolidate the insights of the field into a centralized educational resource–perhaps somewhat in the vein of the Khan Academy–that could claim to offer full coverage, including not only the formidable amount of work being done in contemporary philosophy but also the latest and greatest discoveries in the history of philosophy. (And just in case anyone’s asking, I think the history of philosophy should be understood to include not just The Usual Suspects but also philosophy in the African, East Asian, South Asian, Australian Indigenous, American Indigenous, and other non-Western traditions.)

If any of the above sounds appealing to you, why don’t you give my podcast a listen and then drop me a line? You can find me on Twitter at @ElucidationsPod or check out our blog.

Matt Teichman

Matt Teichman is Full-Time Lecturer at the University of Chicago for the Division of the Humanities.  He is also the host, producer, and creator of the Elucidations podcast. He received his PhD in Philosophy from the University of Chicago in 2015 with a dissertation on generic statements.  Prior to that he was a PhD student in Cinema Studies at the University of Pittsburgh, and currently he is finishing up an MS in Computer Science at the University of Chicago. Although he aims to be a full-service philosopher, his current areas of particular interest include functional programming, type theory, natural language semantics, and feminist philosophy.