Ideas - What Good Is Philosophy?

Episode Date: April 1, 2024

"What is good?" is at the heart of philosophy. Asking the question helps us move toward answers about inclusivity, equality, and who gets a voice at the table. Last year, The Munk School at the University of Toronto hosted philosophers and writers and put philosophy to the test. When it comes to the good, they asked, what good is philosophy? *This episode originally aired on Sept. 8, 2023.

This is a CBC Podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyad. Philosophy, the real thing, has to be devoted to the good, to human flourishing. What is good? It's perhaps the question at the heart of philosophy's origin story. The work of philosophy is to define it and figure out how to get there. Philosophy involves rational persuasion, rational persuasion of actual other human beings. And it doesn't work by just stipulating some idea that you as an

individual find powerful. And to the extent that philosophy involves rational persuasion of other human beings, it's going to be engaging their rational intelligence, and it can do so better if they meet you as equals who are at liberty to exercise their own freedom of thought. What is good isn't abstract. It's relentlessly present in our everyday lives. It underpins how we spend our money, where we give our time, how we vote. It determines who's included in we and who's outside of it. Even just as a woman, you're often not really entitled in ordinary conversation to just say things like, I think that's false. Here is a counterexample or here is an argument that that conclusion isn't true.

Like the ancients, we're also grappling with the question of human flourishing. And as the circle of those asking what is good widens, the answers expand. What we think of as good stretches and contracts. Philosophy actively encourages that because we have this kind of robust practice of, at its best, really encouraging and fostering disagreement. I think it can be an amazing way to empower people who historically would be, yeah, a little bit socially on the outs if they just said, no, this is, I think this is false. And it can actually create a space where that is completely possible and encouraged and socially sanctioned.

Earlier this year, the Munk School at the University of Toronto hosted philosophers and writers and put philosophy to the test. When it comes to the good, they asked, what good is philosophy? In this episode, you'll hear two of those talks. The first from Jennifer Nagel, professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto. She questions whether the practice of philosophy is inherently good and argues that sometimes it could even make things worse. Here in Canada, where the power only fails briefly after ice storms, and we have the luxury of peace, it's easy to lose sight of the power of philosophy. We sometimes see efforts to remind each other of this power. And I have to say the

image that comes to mind for me at this point is a poster that's tacked up in the hallway of my philosophy department. It's entitled, Who Studies Philosophy? And it's produced by the American Philosophical Association. It's available for download on the resources section of their website. And at least in our department, this poster is tacked up between, you know, some kind of flyer begging students to give feedback on their end-of-term course evaluations, and another poster which kind of warns you about five things that constitute cheating on exams and assignments.

So this What Is Philosophy poster is this very, very small patch of inspiration on what's otherwise a pretty bleak board. The poster is simple in its design. It's just got this question, who studies philosophy? And it's got a bunch of names and pictures. And it's not necessarily who you might think. Like there's a prominent picture of the much loved game show host, Alex Trebek, recently dead.

And the singer songwriter, Lana Del Rey, very much alive. For some of those who are listed, the connection with philosophy is really clear. So we see Beverly McLaughlin, who's the first woman and longest serving Chief Justice of the Canadian Supreme Court. And she's very openly credited her education in philosophy as a guiding force in her judicial thinking. So I'd like to think that the University of Alberta's philosophy department, where she took her BA and MA in our discipline, gets a bit of credit for making Canada one of the first countries in the world to legalize same-sex marriage, and for many of the other great decisions that the McLaughlin Court made during Beverly McLaughlin's time as Chief Justice. For other names on this Who Studies

Philosophy poster, the connection's a bit more mysterious. There's, you know, the actor and martial artist Bruce Lee up there, and I'm not sure exactly what his relationship is to philosophy, but I get it. He looks really cool on the poster. To the APA's credit, they have included some people who don't look good at all, like the businessman and cryptocurrency enthusiast, Patrick Byrne, who used to run a company called Overstock, although he ended up quitting in disgrace for reasons that have, it's a long story, but some connection to Vladimir Putin. Patrick Byrne, who has a Ph.D. in philosophy from Stanford, has recently been on tour denying the legitimacy of the most recent American election and claiming that vaccines are poisons. election and claiming that vaccines are poisons. I feel that it adds tremendously to the credibility of the poster to see him there. It's like philosophy can take you anywhere. This is not

a poster that just tells you what you want to hear. There's a nice kind of even-handedness in it. It gives equal prominence to Ayn Rand, the libertarian author, and to Stas Turkel, the radical labor sociologist. Equal prominence to Angela Davis and to George Will, to Bill Clinton, to Rudy Giuliani. There's a famous rabbi, there's a pope, and there's a couple of very outspoken atheists. I mean, doubtless this is not a representative sample of people who have studied philosophy. But I don't think there's any other academic discipline that could pull together such a constellation of figures like history, English lit. I want to see what you've got. But I'm not sure you rival this cast of characters.

I mean, of course, the fact that these characters have studied philosophy doesn't entail that our discipline made them into what they are. I mean, that's the first thing we learn in philosophy, right? That correlation is not the same as causation. Maybe there's some kind of common cause explanation, drawing a certain kind of person both to study philosophy and to make some huge splash in the world. Still, there's a case to be made that there's more than just that kind of correlation here. Because as a discipline, the academic study of philosophy fosters freedom of thought. There's no specific doctrine you need to hold. There's nothing you need to take for granted to be doing philosophy the way that you really do need to take the existence of volcanoes for

granted to be doing volcanology. You can go ahead and deny the existence of the external world. You can swear off classical two-value logic, even worse in my eyes, and you'll still be doing philosophy as long as you show some dedication to working out the consequences of your radical choice. There's something peculiarly philosophical about the consequences of your radical choice. There's something peculiarly philosophical about the spirit of being willing to challenge anything or rethink what's always been taken for granted. When it's coupled with training in the production of arguments, this spirit of intellectual freedom is what turns philosophy into a discipline that enhances your ability to do anything at all, whether that's leading a major world religion or trying to persuade people that God does not exist.

Here we might wonder about the neutrality of philosophy. Philosophical training is sometimes marketed to undergraduates as a generic skill set that can be used for any purpose whatsoever. You just learn to construct an argument to support any given conclusion, no matter how outrageous, which in North America is a pathway into the lucrative professions of law and consultancy. Actually, I myself took a detour into the lucrative world of corporate public relations for a couple of years after my undergraduate degree, and no doubt was strengthened in it by my philosophical training. If this is what philosophy really does, it just enhances completely neutral skill set,

then our departments should be more than a little worried about what's brewing in artificial intelligence right now. Because I think if you know how to prompt them, these new chatbots are getting very good at writing arguments for anything at all. And they're just completely shameless in their capacity to follow instructions without regard for the truth. Their syntax is terrific, and they're really fast. Philosophers themselves might observe that it's somewhat contrary to our discipline's self-image to focus so directly on how our graduates will turn out or what they will do in life. Indeed, the highest status forms of philosophy have no direct connection to practical use. And there's a certain kind of philosopher who takes pride in this. I'm reminded of something the Estonian philosopher and politician Margit Sutrup

once said to me. In her words, there's a certain kind of analytic philosophy that is just endlessly sharpening the knife that never cuts. Now, as far as the threat of chatbots is concerned, philosophers can take some comfort in the thought that philosophy itself doesn't consist of following prompts or orders from users or clients. Although the training we provide can be used to those ends, philosophy itself can be applied to the deeper question of what ends should be pursued in the first place. And as for the concern that true philosophical thinking is practically useless, the course of human history has shown that philosophical thinking,

especially in times of crisis, has made a deep difference to political reality. When it's time to abolish slavery or compose a charter of rights and freedoms, a well-sharpened knife can be put to very good use. Of course, we're not guaranteed in advance that philosophy will always cut in the right direction. And here my thoughts turn back to that poster. One of the characters I recognize with a shiver is the billionaire Peter Thiel, who's co-founder of PayPal and an early investor in Facebook. And he's also someone who studied philosophy at Stanford. In a famous 2009 essay, he complains about government restrictions on human freedom. He's a libertarian. And he declares, there are no truly free places left in our world. He goes on to say that, and I'm quoting, I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.

And in his view, it's democracy that's got to give. He wants to blame women who are a notoriously tough constituency, he says, for libertarians, for this incompatibility between freedom and democracy. for this incompatibility between freedom and democracy. His vision for the future involves non-democratic, privately owned islands in international waters. I think it's a terrible vision and his philosophical arguments against democracy aren't very good, but they should make us think twice about the idea that support for philosophy

is automatically in line with democratic ideals. If the defining feature of philosophy is its disciplinary power to challenge anything, we should be sensitive to its power to make things worse. This is not a new fear. It's expressed quite vividly by Rousseau in his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality. So Rousseau sees humans as naturally compassionate, and philosophers in unequal societies as having an exceptional rational capacity to stifle that aspect of their humanity. Compassion is lively in the state of nature, even among animals, Rousseau suggests. In his view, and I'm quoting, it is reason which turns man's mind back upon itself and divides him from everything that could disturb or afflict him it is philosophy that isolates him and bids

him say at the sight of the misfortunes of others perish if you will i am secure nothing but such general evils has threatened the whole community can disturb the tranquil sleep of the philosopher or tear him from his bed. A murder may with impunity be committed under his window. The philosopher has only to put his hands to his ears and argue a little with himself to prevent nature, which is shocked within him, from identifying itself with the unfortunate sufferer. I think Rousseau is not wrong about the potential power of philosophy to drown out the cries of those who are being killed under our windows. We can decide that there's nothing we can do, or perhaps that any effort to help will only make things worse in the long run. We can focus on the very, very long run where we're more concerned

about the threat from artificial intelligence than the immediate deaths of people in our neighborhoods. We can focus our energy instead on our usual work in epistemology and metaphysics. But of course, Rousseau can't be meaning to condemn philosophy as such. I mean, after all, this really moving passage occurs in the middle of a discourse, which can only be classified as a work of philosophy. I think the key to making sense of this apparent condemnation of philosophy from inside a philosophical work is to refocus our attention on what we bring to philosophy as human beings. Maybe stop putting our hands over our ears and trying to stifle that aspect of our humanity. If the defining feature of our

discipline is that it liberates us from taking any particular doctrine or idea for granted, this is not to say that we can make any progress in it without taking a lot for granted. All arguments need to start from somewhere or aim at something. And different particular philosophers will bring different natural and learned starting points to the debate. The best philosophical arguments are those that are robust to challenges from many sides. And here I'm inclined to go back to the substance of Peter Thiel's worries about women. to go back to the substance of Peter Thiel's worries about women. In my view, some of the most powerful philosophical challenges to libertarianism come from feminist philosophers, and it's no accident that women have been so effective in seeing the problems with theories

like Robert Nozick's. So I'm thinking especially of feminist thinkers like Susan Muller-Oken, who've drawn attention to the fact, which is really salient to women, that we humans have long periods of biological dependency on each other in a way that really challenges the libertarian view of humans as autonomous independent agents interacting in a really transactional way. As a philosopher, Muller-Oken constructs arguments that you don't need to be a woman to appreciate. But as a woman, she notices things that men like Nozick might be inclined to overlook as they start into philosophy. Philosophy as a discipline doesn't require taking any particular doctrine for granted. But I think better philosophy emerges from conversations between people who are inclined to take different things for granted.

And I see this very clearly in my own main research area, epistemology, the philosophical study of knowledge. Epistemology is one of those areas where it can seem like a little philosophy does more harm than good. So I think human beings have a remarkable natural capacity to recognize states of knowledge in each other. All the natural languages of the world draw a line between verbs of knowing, which can attach only to truths, and verbs of thinking or believing that can also embrace falsehoods. We spontaneously track what other people do and don't know in the course of everyday conversation as we move back and forth between the roles of asking and telling.

And we don't need philosophy for this. In fact, something strange happens when we first try to apply philosophy to gain a reflective understanding of knowledge itself. I mean, what do you really know? Do you know that you're watching a video right now or that I'm speaking? Could this be a dream?

Especially in purely solitary, inward-looking investigation of the nature of knowledge, it can seem like ordinary argumentative ways of thinking drive us towards skepticism. We can try to come up with reasons for what we believe, but any reason we produce on our own seems to be open to challenge from within, in a regress that's been familiar since antiquity. Perhaps because these skeptical paths are so easily traced by those starting out in philosophy, many people assume that the standard philosophical approach to knowledge must be a negative one, that nothing is really known by the standards of philosophers. I can tell you that this is very far

from the truth. Among professional epistemologists, there are virtually no skeptics at all, and in part because the skeptic's position is one which conflicts so deeply with the human experience which naturally drives us to philosophy. There has been remarkable recent progress in epistemology, and I think that's in large measure due to the diversity of philosophers who have participated in it, from distinct starting points grounded in everything from formal mathematical modeling to linguistic patterns in spontaneous knowledge attribution. If a little bit of philosophy could make you feel like there can't be any such thing as knowledge, a deeper dive into it will easily reassure you that knowledge is alive and well, and there's a very robust distinction between knowing something to be the case and just

happening to be right about it. Even if this is a distinction whose exact contours we're still working very hard to understand. I think there's political power in the notion that knowledge really exists and can be rationally defended, but I'm not sure I'd want to say that the pursuit of philosophy stands in need of justification from its potential political payoff. I think that philosophical thinking has intrinsic value, and it's part of human flourishing to think in new ways about questions of fundamental importance. Philosophy isn't great because it tends to support democracy. Philosophy can be used to support anti-democratic ideals. Rather, I want to say democracy is great because it gives human beings the chance to think philosophically,

to practice a certain kind of self-determination, recognizing the equal rights of others to do so. The self-determination that democracy affords can be expressed in many ways, but philosophy is not the least of them. In closing, I want to take a moment to read an extremely old piece of philosophy from a pre-democratic time. So this small philosophical passage comes from the Zhuangzi, a classic of Chinese philosophy from about 2300 years ago. So this is roughly from the time of Plato. And it's a conversation between a duke and a craftsman, a wheelwright, blue-collar worker. Duke Juan was reading up in his pavilion while wheelwright Flatty was hewing a wheel below. Putting down his hammer and chisel, the wheelwright ascended and asked Duke Juan, sir, may I ask what sort of words you are reading?

Sir, may I ask what sort of words you are reading? The duke said, the words of sages. Are those sages still alive? They are dead, said the duke. Then what you are perusing is no more than the dregs and dust of the ancients. Duke Juan replied, does a wheelwright dare to pass judgment on what his ruler reads? If you can explain yourself well and good, if not, you shall die. Wheelwright Flatty said, I'm looking at it from the point of view of my own profession.

In hewing a wheel, if I spin too slowly and make the hub too loose, it attaches to the crossbar but not firmly. If I spin quickly and make it tight, I have to struggle to attach it and it never really gets all the way in. I have to make it not too loose and not too tight, my hand feeling it and my mind constantly responsive to it. I cannot explain this with my mouth, and yet there's a certain knack to the procedure. I can't even get my own son to grasp it, so even he has no way to learn it from me. Thus, I'm already 70 years old and still hear busily hewing wheels as an old man. The ancients died, and that which they could not transmit died along with them. So I say that what you, my Lord, are perusing is just the dust and dregs of the ancients, nothing more. I find an exquisite instability here when I read this passage with my students.

On the one hand, we can have a strong sense of what this wheelwright means. There's something about his practical knowledge of crafting the wheel that he can't put in words, something about his special personal intelligence that will die with him. On the other hand, the author of this text has somehow put exactly this into words. These words are alive for us from a very distant starting point. The text that we're reading is from a long dead author, but it's not a dead text. It's not just dust and dregs. The text derives part of its literary power from the fact that it depicts a conversation taking place between two socially very unequal people,

one of whom is speaking his mind under immediate threat of death, but very much as a philosophical peer to the other. I think there's a lot we could say philosophically about this text and about the line between practical and theoretical knowledge, but I want to close by just expressing my appreciation for it as a piece of philosophy that has value in itself. Thank you. Thank you. on ABC Radio National and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. Find us and our vast archive on the CBC Listen app and wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayyad. philosophers love a good argument philosophy actively encourages that because we have this kind of robust practice of at its best really encouraging and fostering disagreement i think

it can be an amazing way to empower people who historically would be, yeah, a little bit socially on the outs if they just said, no, this is, I think this is false. And it can actually create a space where that is completely possible and encouraged and socially sanctioned. Now, again, it's kind of a double-edged sword because that also means that philosophy can be a difficult practice for historically excluded people who need to feel and actually be supported to feel comfortable doing that kind of robust disagreeing

and directly challenging authority figures, including, you know, old dead white guys like Plato and Aristotle. Kate Mann is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Cornell University. And like Jennifer Nagel's lecture, she challenges the assumed inherent good in philosophical discourse. When people really do get into the spirit, anyone can be challenged, again, for almost any reason, bearing in mind there are cases where it would be

I do think horrible to challenge certain views that come directly from people's humanity or lived experience but absent that you kind of get to think what you want and that is a liberating practice so these parts of philosophy that are good and bad, they're not really separable. There's both room for someone to say that's false in a domineering spirit, which given the overall context and the other things that they say and the overall power dynamics and the overall rhetoric they use can establish this sense that like, oh, you can't contradict blah, blah, blah's view about blah, blah, blah. That's just, you know, the correct view. But it can also lead to a situation where, you know, people who are even like quite low down pernicious

social hierarchies get to say that's false to the most socially powerful people. And they might well be right if they're sufficiently thoughtful and reasoning well. And it's both a cool thing that happens using reasoning, but it's also a cool thing that happens socially to watch a student who maybe hasn't been empowered because of aspects of their social position begin to see that their contributions in direct contradiction to authority figures, including unwittingly mine in the classroom, but those are really welcome and valued and delighted in even as part of that ongoing dialectic. In her lecture at the Munk School's conference, What Good is Philosophy? Kate Mann talks about her longtime philosophical preoccupation, gaslighting, the tactic of making someone question their experience of reality, making them feel unstable, irrational, and not credible. She explains how philosophy can help push back against gaslighting by providing the intellectual tools needed to disagree with social superiors.

So a couple of years ago, I was privy via a friend to a discussion around hiring that had taken place in their philosophy department. Not mine, I assure you. Depressingly, it was an even higher ranking department. Some faculty members had expressed concern that their short list of candidates included only two women and eight men. Other faculty members pushed back against this worry. It's a meritocracy in philosophy. We want to hire the best person regardless of gender, as if that would be what would be achieved via these gendered implicit biases. via these gendered implicit biases. One man actually said out loud in front of his female colleagues, we've gone the affirmative action route in the past and it's been a disaster. Women in philosophy are just crazy. I was reminded of this incident recently by a depressingly similar anecdote recounted to me by another friend. Yes, these are just anecdotes,

but the data, as well as personal experience, suggest these problems are systemic. Philosophy is not just white male dominated, it is systematically misogynistic, as well as racist, classist, ableist, transphobic, homophobic, and, as I've been arguing recently, fatphobic. homophobic and as I've been arguing recently fatphobic. So why do I stay in it? What is the point? It's depressing. The truth is much as I think philosophy attracts a certain kind of person who uses the tools of the discipline to establish and maintain dominance the status quo etc philosophy also has the power to help us push back against such people. More broadly, it can arm those of us who care to fight important battles for social justice. Of particular concern to me today, it can help us to combat gaslighting in the discipline and

beyond it, and thus to combat attitudes like the ones that we saw betrayed by the man in my opening incident. I think the result is not so much a paradox or even a tension, but just an awkward social fact. Philosophy both contains numerous gaslighters, and it can help us to free ourselves of their influence. It can also make us more insightful about the ways in which we ourselves might unwittingly act in ways which gaslight others, or at least discourage their disagreement. And it can help us to do better. I want to begin here by introducing you to the basic original story

of the gaslighter via the play Gaslight, sometimes also known as Angel Street by Patrick Hamilton. Then I'll tell you my definition of gaslighting and highlight some features of the definition. I'll then draw on an insight of Kate Abramson's to explain the situation in philosophy as I see it and to do with the way that gaslighters are constitutionally allergic to the kind of healthy disagreement which we ought to be fostering and encouraging. So gaslighting takes its name from the 1938 Patrick Hamilton play Angel Street, which was performed on stage as Gaslight. The play was subsequently made into two films by the latter name, both the US and UK version, and those films have become better known

than the original play. But the play is to my mind richer than either film, so I want to use it as the basis for the discussion here. A discussion in which I draw on my 2020 book entitled How Male Privilege Hurts Women, specifically Chapter 8, which is called Unassuming. In Gaslight, as I'm referring to it, Mr. Manningham appears to be intent on sending his wife, Bella, insane. Bella insane. His original motives for doing so only become apparent during the end of the first act of the play, but importantly his behaviour is intelligible right from the beginning, lending the play its claustrophobic, indeed suffocating, atmosphere. Act one is a vivid depiction of domestic terror. Mr Manningham wrong- foots and undermines his wife at every turn, humiliating her in front of their servant, correcting her constantly, and even impugning the anxiety he is thereby instilling in her as irrational and baseless. There's a moment where

he says, why are you so apprehensive, Bella? I was not about to reproach you. And Bella replies, Bella, I was not about to reproach you. And Bella replies, no, dear, I know you weren't. He goes on to reproach, indeed berate her shortly thereafter. In a particularly cruel and long running series of manipulations, Mr. Manningham has led his wife to believe that she's going out of her mind and losing possession of her rational faculties by regularly hiding their possessions around their home and then holding her responsible for their disappearance. And he holds her responsible not merely causally but morally, depicting her as mischievous and wicked as well as confused and delusional. He also accuses her most painfully of all of deliberately hurting their pet dog, also accuses her most painfully of all of deliberately hurting their pet dog, thus painting her as the cruel and abusive one. She actually loves the dog dearly and would never do anything

to hurt her pet. Now, the combination of accusations at stake here is, of course, incoherent, as Bell and Manningham actually tries repeatedly to point out to her husband. If she really was confused and delusional and couldn't help her behavior, then surely he should be trying to help her and treating her kindly rather than getting angry. But Mr. Manningham ignores this, as he does with all of his wife's attempts to prevail upon his goodwill. She's truly powerless within her household and she is nobody outside of it since Mr Manningham has deliberately isolated her from all of her friends and relatives. So she has no choice but to defer to him and even then it does little to appease his seething temper. The effect of Mr Manningham's behavior, a devastating portrait of a recognizable pattern of abuse,

which subsequently came to be known as gaslighting, is to deprive Bella of her sense of entitlement to state even the most basic realities. Towards the end of Act One, in an arguably disappointing deus ex machina, a detective comes to visit her and tells her this terrible albeit liberating truth. Her husband Mr Manningham is actually the diabolical Sidney Power who murdered the former resident of their home Alice Barlow in order to steal the famous Barlow rubies. Mr Manningham aka Sidney Power slit Barlow's throat to silence her some 15 years prior. But he may never have managed to locate the rubies. Detective Ruff thinks and confides in Bella and the detective has come to the conclusion that he is still looking for the jewels on the top floor of the house which is in

fact why he persuaded Bella to buy this house with her family money. So this top floor of the house, which is in fact why he persuaded Bella to buy this house with her family money. So this top floor of the house is shut up and off limits to everyone but him, even the servants can't go up here. So that's the background for this piece of dialogue I'll now give you. So might he be looking for the jewels upstairs in this attic, this shut up attic every evening? He might indeed, Bella realizes. So Bella says, it all sounds so incredible when I'm alone at night, but I get the idea that somebody's walking about up there, up there. At night when my husband's out, I hear noises from my bedroom, but I'm too afraid to go

up. The detective asks, have you told your husband this? And Bella says, but I'm too afraid to go up. The detective asks, have you told your husband this? And Bella says, no, I'm afraid to. He gets angry. He says, I imagine things which don't exist. Detective Ruff asks, it never struck you, did it, that it might be your own husband walking about up there? Bella Manningham says, yes, that is what I thought, but I thought I must be mad. Tell me how you know. Detective says, tell me how you knew, Mrs. Manningham. Bella says, it's true.

It's true. I knew it. I knew it. Notice the epistemic language here. So Bella did indeed know deep down that her husband was creeping about upstairs because and this is where the term gaslighting comes from 10 minutes after her husband went out every evening ostensibly outside the gaslight in her bedroom would ebb and 10 minutes later sorry 10 minutes before he came back it would return to its former full flame now Now what that meant in Victorian England was that the gas light was ebbing because another light had been switched on then off again somewhere else in

the house and Bella Manningham realized that it could only be happening in the attic where this other gas light must have been turned on siphoning pressure away from the light in her bedroom. So you see, it's kind of a complicated and much subtler setup than in the film where the husband actually denies the wife's perception of the gas light flickering. Here, Bell and Manningham was forced to deny and could barely admit to herself what she actually knew. Her husband's epistemic domination over her was so total that she didn't dare to question his movements, let alone his motives. His sense of entitlement was so great to maintain this dominant narrative that she was the one who felt guilty for entertaining even the slightest doubts about her scurrilous lying husband. From the very beginning of the play, exchanges like the following show how little latitude she has to question either the rightness of his beliefs

or the benevolence of his actions. In act one, she ventures hopefully, oh Jack dear, you have been so much kinder lately lately is it possible you're beginning to see my point of view mr manningham replies i don't know that i ever differed from it did i bella oh jack dear it's true it's true says bella manningham so in the context of the action as a whole it's clear she's not allowed to question his kindness a cruelty, and she doesn't even bring up the gas lights flickering because she knows it would lead to rage on his part. So let's back up here and now do some philosophy. I've argued based on these and other similar real life cases that gaslighting should be understood as follows. A systematic process

that makes someone feel defective in some way, morally, rationally, or even health-wise, for mental states like beliefs, desires, intentions, bodily states, and so on, to which they are in reality entitled. So this definition is partly my attempt to make sense of the fact that gaslighting may but need not be intentional. Notice that we don't require even an agent in order to make this definition of gaslighting work. Gaslighting may but need not involve this individual agent who is trying to harm us, as in the paradigm cases.

And this makes sense of the fact that, as the philosopher Elena Ruiz has insightfully argued, gaslighting can also be perpetrated against people by whole collectives and practices and institutions, and thus constitute a purely structural phenomenon in some cases. For example, a purely structural phenomenon in some cases. For example, one perpetrated by white supremacy and the associated colonialist practices against people of colour. Okay. But nonetheless, this definition still makes sense

of the fact that some individuals do gaslight, and we can now ask an obvious question. Why do individuals do this exactly? And here I want to draw on an insight of Kate Abramson's, who offers, I think, a brilliant answer to this question. In her view, the gaslighter considered as an individual agent is someone who cannot abide by disagreement. He is not just anxious about, but almost allergic to being successfully contradicted. Other points of view, other perspectives are verboten to him. They're anathema to him. You see why I included that quote about Bella wondering whether her husband

might be beginning to see her point of view, because that's exactly what the gaslighter shuts down, as he does indeed in that exchange by saying, we never differed. To quote Kate Abramson on this phenomenon of this kind of allergy to disagreement, what makes the difference between the fellow who ignores or dismisses evidence that his desires cannot be satisfied versus the one who gaslights

is the inability to tolerate even the possibility of challenge end quote okay and this is from her 2014 piece in Phil Perspectives turning up the lights on gaslighting but we should reflect that the gaslighter is someone who can't tolerate challenges in a particular way. He doesn't simply kill his victim, which would be another surefire way of preventing her from challenging him, as Abramson also points out. Unless you object here that he may have some kind of compunction about murder, reflect that our paradigm case of a gaslighter is someone who is also a murderer, albeit with respect to different targets and victims. And this is also true, by the way, in many real life cases, we find that these are also

in the most extreme cases of gaslighting, people willing to murder others. But when it comes to the target of the gaslighting, this won't work, this, you know know idea of just eliminating someone's perspective by eliminating them because the gaslighter wants to maintain the appearance the illusion of an ongoing conversation a dialectic and a subject who is capable of disagreeing with him and he wants to invariably win the argument or forestall it in the first place, making for a series of Pyrrhic victories. He wants to set things up so that he will get to feel like he has prevailed, even though in reality he set things up so that the victim really doesn't dare to question him. I was reminded when I was thinking about this of a quote, of a line of Donald Trump's, which he said

in the lead up to the 2016 election, we're going to win so much, we're going to get sick and tired of winning. A kind of inadvertent stroke of brilliance via his usual malapropism and cliche strategy. Okay, so to get back to the kind of issue of how philosophy might be attracted to people who gaslight, how it might in fact attract gaslighting types, even represent at its worst a culture of gaslighting, you get to kind of imply in philosophy at particular points that it's not just that other people are wrong, it's that they're irrational or sort of crazy. They're missing something obvious, they're reasoning poorly or even displaying poor moral character in as much as they take a different view,

a different perspective. They are oversensitive or they're too woke or they're just not talented enough to see the truth. Again, this is a direct quote that I've heard in the context of philosophers trying to establish dominance over other people in the room. Or insert any other summarily dismissive and monolithic intellectual character assessment of the kind that is acceptable in philosophy and in very few other disciplines. So I think that this is gaslighting, or at least channels the spirit that gaslighting exemplifies by shutting down healthy disagreement. I'm guessing this dynamic will be familiar to many people in the audience. But here's the good news. Philosophy is a discipline which prides itself not only on being a paradigmatically rational enterprise, just something I could do without, to be honest,

especially when we're doing so to compare ourselves flatteringly to other humanities disciplines. But more positively, philosophy is also one that encourages everyone to ask questions and to push back against almost anything and almost anyone for almost any reason. So I think philosophy actually has the tools and the power not just to provide us with important you know conceptual wherewithal here but also just as importantly the social wherewithal to challenge gaslighting inside and outside of the discipline. It can make us able to say, no, wait on, that actually doesn't sound right to me. And is that really irrational or crazy to think or to do? Or is it in fact an important challenge to a prevailing and powerful orthodoxy? That's something we can do in philosophy. to a prevailing and powerful orthodoxy. That's something we can do in philosophy, and in fact,

it is socially sometimes encouraged in our discipline. So I want to be clear here. Am I hence saying that we need to be open to any argument whatsoever? Not quite. I think that would be too simple. There are arguments and views which strike me as genuinely beyond the pale for a simple principled reasoning reason and one which indeed resonates with the goal of having a gaslighting resistant or anti-gaslighting philosophical practice. I think there are views which say effectively that some people do not deserve to be heard either explicitly or implicitly, for example, by denying their humanity or their obviously authoritative lived experience and their testimony about who they are or what they go through in the world. I think both trans people and disabled people

are often subject to these forms of pernicious denial in philosophy, and it in fact has much to do with the way some people are gaslit. It has much the same effect as gaslighting in systematically keeping certain voices and perspectives out of the conversation. We've seen this might be achieved in other cases in very concrete material ways by calling female philosophers crazy as a rationale for not hiring us. So the general principle I'm gesturing towards, and I think this will be too simple for a bunch of reasons, but it's like just a first pass attempt. It might go something like this. We should be open to any disagreement and count it as a valid one in as much as it doesn't systematically exclude or prevent some people from entering into disagreements because of

their social identities. Here's like a very rough analogy to kind of motivate thinking along these lines. Perhaps we should be prepared to democratically deliberate or vote about any matter except taking the vote away from some subjects within a deliberative democracy on the basis of who they are as subjects. So it's something like that structure. How then, I think the question remains practically, do we do philosophy in this kind of anti-gaslighting, gaslighting resistant or broadly democratic spirit? How do we take firm stands ourselves sometimes, as I have myself here today, without unwittingly encouraging others to fall into line,

or even perhaps gaslighting them unintentionally if we have some form of authority over them? So I won't pretend this is an easy task, but I think it is at least possible. Think about what we do when we're teaching, for example. I think we find ourselves regularly capable of defending a certain position, which we may sometimes truly believe in. We don't always play devil's advocate in the classroom, but we do so in a way, I hope, that allows and indeed invites intelligent, respectful disagreement from our students. We hold forth and we are perhaps passionate about the views we defend, but then we listen. And we may or may not adjust our views going forward.

We may or may not even be open to doing so, but we are open to others' dissent. Our practice is geared towards making space for it in an ongoing conversation more broadly we regard some disagreements as when we do have a stake in but nevertheless do not want to win in the sense of convincing everyone else that they are necessarily mistaken rather I think we can sometimes regard fruitful, intelligent disagreement, not convergence, as the epistemic gold standard and the aim of the exercise. And we can regard ourselves as one epistemic community member, among others, who does not want to prevail, again, necessarily. We want to be a part of an ongoing and historical conversation and to play our small part in it.

Perhaps at its best, the philosophical community can be like this and hence inviting to everyone rather than dismissing some historically excluded people as crazy or similar. Thank you. or similar. Thank you. at Kyiv Mohyla Academy in Ukraine. Special thanks to conference organizers Erin Wendland and Jamie Napier. Ideas has a large archive of shows on everything from philosophy to literature, physics to history. You can hear conversations like the one I had with Ukrainian poet Luba Yakimchuk about the importance of art during a time of war.

I grew up in a small town where I could see a slag heap from my parents' yard. My father was a miner. These slag heaps are very impressive. Usually people compare them with Egyptian pyramids. Poet Luba Yakumchuk grew up in Donbass in eastern Ukraine, the region bordering Russia that is a flashpoint in the current conflict. Long before Donbass was a war zone, Lupa experienced it as a kind of paradise. In the spring, you could see the wild apricots in bloom. When I was a child, these apricots were still a way to earn money.

After the collapse of the USSR, there was a huge economic crisis and people literally had nothing to live on. But there were these wild apricots which we sold to conductors of the train that passed from Kyiv to Moscow. There was a Russian border near my town of Pervomaisk, and one of my distant relatives said one time

that after crossing the border, the apricot trees are nowhere to be seen. And actually, that's why my long poem Apricots of Donbass has the motto where no more apricots grow Russia stars. Now this territory is occupied but the borders still exist by these apricot trees

and it's like forever. When pro-Russian separatists took control of the region in 2014, Luba's parents tried to stay in that house by those wild apricot trees. But like so many others, eventually they had to flee. For the last five years, Luba's childhood home has been occupied by a sniper. Her family made a new home in central Ukraine. But now, as Russia invades, the entire country is in danger. Kyiv is going maybe to be next, and we see it right now.

On ideas, language, war, and the burden of a motherland. That program, Words Fall Apart, along with many others, are available on the CBC Listen app and wherever you get your podcasts. This episode was produced by Nahid Mustafa

with help from Annie Bender. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Technical production, Danielle Duval. The senior producer, Nikola Lukšić. The executive producer of Ideas is Greg Kelly. And I'm Nala Ayyad. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.