Category: Books

At the same time I started reading economics, at age 13, I also was reading philosophy.  I lived in Hillsdale, New Jersey, but River Vale had a better public library for those topics, so I would ride my bike there periodically and take out books (I also learned about Thelonious Monk and Miles Davis by bringing home scratched LPs).

Most of all, I was drawn to the Great Books series, most of all the philosophy in there.  I figured I should read all of them.  So of course I started with the Dialogues of Plato, which occupied my attention for a long time to come.  Aristotle was boring to me, though at the time (and still) I felt he was more correct than Plato.

I also, from the beginning, never bought the argument that Socrates was the mouthpiece of Plato.  In my early view (and still), Plato was the real genius, and he upgraded the second-rate Socrates to a smarter figure, mostly to make the dialogues better.  The dialogic nature of Plato shows is true genius, because any single point of view you might find in there is quite untenable.

My favorite dialogues were the classic ones, such as Crito, Apology, Phaedo, and Symposium.  Parmenides was a special obsession, though reader beware.  It seemed fundamental and super-important.  Timaeus intrigued me, as did Phaedrus, but I found them difficult.  I appreciated The Republic only much later, most of all after reading the Allan Bloom introduction to the Chicago edition.  My least favorite was Laws.

The other major event was buying a philosophy textbook by John Hospers (yes, if you are wondering that is the same John Hospers who wrote all that gay porn under a pseudonym).  I think I bought this one in NYC rather than taking it out of the library.  It explained the basic history of “early modern philosophy” running through Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant, and that fascinated me.  So I decided I should be reading all those people and I did.  Berkeley and Hume were the most fun.  I already could see, from my concomitant economics reading, that Kant could not think at the margin.

Other early philosophy readings, in high school, were Popper, Nietzsche, and Doseoyevsky, at the time considering Karamazov a kind of philosophy book.  Some Sartre, and whatever else I could find in the library.  Lots of libertarian philosophy, such as Lysander Spooner’s critique of social contract theories of the state.  I also read a number of books on atheism, such as by Antony Flew and George Smith, and a good deal of C.S. Lewis, such as God in the Dock.  Arthur Koestler on the ghost in the machine.  William James on free will.  Various 1960s and 1970s screeds, many of which were on the margins of philosophy.  Robert Pirsig bored me, not rigorous enough, etc., but I imbibed many such “works of the time.”  They nonetheless helped to define the topic for me, as did my readings in science fiction.  If I was reading Popper’s Poverty of Historicism, and Theory and History by Mises, I also was thinking of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy.

For a brief while I considered becoming a philosopher, though I decided that the economist path was better and far more practical, and also more useful to the world.

I kept on reading philosophy through my undergraduate years.  The biggest earthquake was reading Quine.  All of a sudden I was seeing a very different approach to what social science propositions and economic models were supposed to mean.  (I never had been satisfied with Friedman, Samuelson, or the Austrians on ecoomic methodology.)  For a long time I thought I would write a 100-page essay “Hayek and Quine,” but I never did.  Nonetheless some radical new doors were opened for me, most of all a certain kind of freedom in intellectual interpretation.  I also was influenced a good deal by reading Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men/Starmaker novels, feeding into my speculative bent.

I didn’t do much with philosophy classes, though in graduate school at Harvard I sat in on Hilary Putnam’s philosophy of language class (with my friend Kroszner).  That was one of the very best classes I ever had, maybe the best.  At Harvard I also got to know Nozick a bit, and of course he was extraordinarily impressive.  At that time I also studied Goethe and German romanticism closely, and never felt major allergies toward the Continental approaches.

One day at Harvard, in 1984, I walked into Harvard Book Store and saw a copy of Parfit’s Reasons and Persons, which had just come out.  I hadn’t known of Parfit before, but immediately decided I had to buy and read the book.  I was hooked, and spent years working on those problems, including for part of my dissertation, which was hardly advisable from a job market point of view.  Like Quine, that too changed my life and worldview.  “Quine and Parfit” would be an interesting essay too.

When I took my first job at UC Irvine, I hung out with some of the philosophers there, including the excellent Alan Nelson and also Gregory Kavka, with whom I co-authored a bit.  Greg and I became very good friends, and his early death was a great tragedy.  I also enjoyed my periodic chats with David Gordon, a non-academic philosopher who lives in Los Angeles and the best-read philosopher I have met.

In the late 1980s I met Derek Parfit, and ended up becoming Derek’s only co-author, on the social discount rate.  The full story there is told in Dave Edmonds’s excellent biography of Parfit, so I won’t repeat it here.  These posts are for secrets!  I will add that Derek struck me as the most philosophical person I ever have met, the most truly committed to philosophy as a method and a way of life.  That to me is still more important than any particular thing he wrote.  Your writings and your person are closely related, but they also are two separate things.  Not enough philosophers today give sufficient thought to who they are.

After the collaboration with Parfit, he wrote me a letter and basically offered to bring me into his group at Oxford (under what terms was not clear).  That felt like a dead end to me, plus a big cut in lifetime income, and so I did not pursue the opportunity.

I ended up with four articles in the philosophical equivalent of the “top five” journals in economics.  I also was pleased and honored when Peter Singer invited me to present my paper “Policing Nature” to his philosophy group at Princeton.  I think of my books The Age of the Infovore and Stubborn Attachments as more philosophy than anything else, though synthetic of course.

I have continued to read philosophy over the years.  Next on my list is the new translation of Maimonides, which on first glance seems like a big improvement.  However I read much less philosophy in refereed journals than I used to.  Frankly, I think most of it is not very philosophical and also not very interesting.  It is not about real problems, but rather tries to carve out a small piece that is both marginally noticeable by an academic referee and also defensible, again to an academic referee.  That strikes me as a bad way to do philosophy.  It worked pretty well say in the 1960s, but these days those margins are just too small.

Most professional philosphers seem to me more like bureaucrats than philosophers.  They simply do not embody philosophic ideals, either in their writings or in their persons.  Most of all I am inclined to reread philosophic classics, read something “Continental,” or read philosophic works that to most people would not count as philosophy at all.  An excellent tweet on AI can be extraordinarily philosophical in the best sense of the term, and like most of the greatest philosophy from the past it is not restricted by the canons of refereed journals.  Maxims have a long and noble history in philosophy.

My notion of who is a philosopher has broadened extensively over the years.  I think of Patrick Collison, Camille Paglia, and the best Ross Douthat columns (among many other examples, let’s toss in the best Matt Y. sentences as well, and the best Peter Thiel observations), not to mention some art and architecture and music critics, as some of the best and most important philosophy of our time.  The best philosophy of Agnes Callard (NYT) does not look like formal philosophy at all.  I know it is hard for many of you to make this mental shift, but revisit how Kierkegaaard and Schopenhauer wrote and you might find it possible.  And of course the very greatest philosophers of our time are the people who are building and learning how to use the quality LLMs.

A simple rule of thumb is that if no one is writing you, and telling you that you changed their lives, you probably are not a philosopher.  You cannot expect such feedback in mathematical logic, or early in your career, but still it is not a bad place to start for judging this issue.

Looking back, I now see myself as having chosen the path of philosophy more than economics.  I view myself as a philosopher who knows a lot of economics and who writes about economics (among other things).  I am comfortable with that redefinition of self, and it makes my career and my time allocation easier to understand.

And now to go try that new Maimonides edition…