The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss - Solveig Gold and Joshua Katz | The War on Science Interviews | Day 9

Episode Date: August 1, 2025

To celebrate the release on July 29th of The War on Science, we have recorded 20 podcast interviews with authors from the book. Starting on July 22nd, with Richard Dawkins, we will be releasing one interview per day. Interviewees in order, will be:Richard Dawkins July 23rdNiall Ferguson July 24thNicholas Christakis July 25thMaarten Boudry July 26thAbigail Thompson July 27thJohn Armstrong July 28thSally Satel – July 30Elizabeth Weiss – July 31Solveig Gold and Joshua Katz – August 1Frances Widdowson – August 2Carole Hooven – August 3Janice Fiamengo – August 4Geoff Horsman – August 5Alessandro Strumia – August 6Roger Cohen and Amy Wax – August 7Peter Boghossian – August 8Lauren Schwartz and Arthur Rousseau – August 9Alex Byrne and Moti Gorin – August 10Judith Suissa and Alice Sullivan – August 11Karleen Gribble – August 12Dorian Abbot – August 13The topics these authors discuss range over ideas including the ideological corruption of science, historical examples of the demise of academia, free speech in academia, social justice activism replacing scholarship in many disciplines, disruptions of science from mathematics to medicine, cancel culture, the harm caused by DEI bureaucracies at universities, distortions of biology, disingenous and dangerous distortions of the distinctions between gender and sex in medicine, and false premises impacting on gender affirming care for minors, to, finally, a set of principles universities should adopt to recover from the current internal culture war. The dialogues are blunt, and provocative, and point out the negative effects that the current war on science going on within universities is having on the progress of science and scholarship in the west. We are hoping that the essays penned by this remarkable group of scholars will help provoke discussion both within universities and the public at large about how to restore trust, excellence, merit, and most important sound science, free speech and free inquiry on university campuses. Many academics have buried their heads in the sand hoping this nonsense will go away. It hasn’t and we now need to become more vocal, and unified in combatting this modern attack on science and scholarship. The book was completed before the new external war on science being waged by the Trump administration began. Fighting this new effort to dismantle the scientific infrastructure of the country is important, and we don’t want to minimized that threat. But even if the new attacks can be successfully combatted in Congress, the Courts, and the ballot box, the longstanding internal issues we describe in the new book, and in the interviews we are releasing, will still need to be addressed to restore the rightful place of science and scholarship in the west. I am hoping that you will find the interviews enlightening and encourage you to look at the new book when it is released, and help become part of the effort to restore sound science and scholarship in academia. With no further ado, The War on Science interviews…As always, an ad-free video version of this podcast is also available to paid Critical Mass subscribers. Your subscriptions support the non-profit Origins Project Foundation, which produces the podcast. The audio version is available free on the Critical Mass site and on all podcast sites, and the video version will also be available on the Origins Project YouTube. Get full access to Critical Mass at lawrencekrauss.substack.com/subscribe

Hi, and welcome to the Origins Podcast. I'm your host Lawrence Krause. As many of you know, my new book, The War on Science, is appearing July 29th of this year in the United States and Canada. And to celebrate that, we've interviewed many of the authors of the 39 authors who have contributed to this volume, and we have 20 separate podcast interviews

that will be airing over the next 20 days, starting July 22nd, before and after the last. the book first appears with many of the authors in the book on a host of different subjects. The authors we will have interviews with in order of appearance over the next 20 days are Richard Dawkins, Neil Ferguson, Nicholas Christakis, Martin Budry, Abigail Thompson, John Armstrong, Sally Sattel, Solveig Gold, and Joshua Katz, Francis Wooderson, Carol Hoven, Janice Fiamengo, Jeff Horsman, Alessandro Strumia, Roger Cohen and Amy Wax, Peter Bogosian, Lauren Schwartz and Arthur Rousseau, Alex

Byrne and Modi Gorin, Judith Sisa, and Alice Sullivan, Carleen Grible, and finally Dorian Abbott. The topics that will be discussed will range over the need for free speech and open inquiry and science and the need to preserve scientific integrity stressed by our first podcast interviewer Richard Dawkins. and will once again go over historical examples of how academia has been hijacked by ideology in the past and the negative consequences that have come from that to issues of how specific disciplines, including mathematics, have been distorted,

and how certain departments at universities now specifically claim that they are social activists and a degree in their field is a degree in either critical social justice or social activism, not a degree in a specific area of scholarship, how ideology is permeated universities. We'll proceed also to discuss issues in medicine. Sally Satel will talk about how social justice is hijacked medicine. And also, when it comes to issues of gender affirming care, we have a variety of authors who are going to speak about the issues there and how too often gender affirming care claims are made.

are not based on empirical evidence. In fact, falsely discuss the literature in ways that are harmful to young people. We will talk to several people who, for one reason, another, have been canceled for saying things. Francis Whittleson at Mount Royal University in Canada, and Carol Hoeven from Harvard, who eventually had to leave Harvard after saying on television that sex is binary in biology will be talking to people who've looking at, at the impact of diversity, equity, and inclusion in academia, and how it's restricting free inquiry, and also restricting, in many ways, scientific merit at those universities.

And finally, Dorian Abbott, the last contributor to our series, will be talking about three principles he believes are essential to separate science and politics and keep academia free from ideology and more for open questioning and progress and to make sure that science is based on empirical evidence and where we go where the evidence is, whether it's convenient or not, whether it's politically correct or not, and we're willing to debate all ideas that nothing is sacred, a central feature of what science should be about

and what in some sense this podcast is about. So I hope you really enjoy the next 20 days and we've enjoyed bringing it to you. So with no further ado, the war on science, the interviews. Well, I'm so happy to have Joshua Katz and Salvee Gold here together, sharing a microphone, a first for the origins podcast, and to talk about their article for the book, The War on Science. The title of the article is called An Apology for Philology,

which is also rhyme, I just realized, as I say it. But that's probably, I don't know if that entered into why he made that title. We'll get to that. but both of you, thank you very much for being here. It's nice. I've met Joshua. I finally the first time just recently, but Salve, it's first time I've met you just virtually, but thank you for both coming on,

and thank you for writing for the book. I really appreciate it. Thank you. It's great to be here. It is great to have you. Now, the Origins podcast is an Origins podcast, and that means I like to learn about where people, how people got to the point of what we're talking about.

And so I wanted to talk to each of you for a little while about your own origin story. And I'll start with Joshua, who most recently academic position was a Cotson professor in humanities at Princeton. Your background, you studied at Yale in linguistics, and I don't know if I ever asked you, you're younger than me. When was that? I was an undergraduate at Yale from 1987 to 1991.

Okay. So we relaxed a little bit. I remember. Yeah, exactly. So had you been wise, you could have taken my class on physics for poets, but you didn't. Had I been wise, I could have taken a class of physics for not poets. But fortunately, part of my origin, as my wife knows, is that one of two subjects I was incompetent in was physics. I was very good at math.

I was very good at chemistry. It was unbelievably bad at physics. No doubt I am unbelievably bad at physics. Okay. Well, that answers one of the questions I have, because I always ask people, Why didn't you do physics? Truly, nobody wants me to do physics. But anyway, and you did linguistics.

What got you interested in linguistics? It's not necessarily, I mean, it's an interesting field to choose to do your undergraduate major. And a lot of people, I think, do a graduate degree in linguistics with an undergraduate to something else because they're not wise enough to realize what it's all about early on. But what caused you to do that at Yale? Well, I think pretty much I had that down from the age of about five. That's probably something of an exaggeration, but it is true that I started assembling grammar books and learning funny languages from the age of five.

And by the time I was in double digits, I knew a lot of languages, particularly a lot of dead languages. and somehow or other, in fact, in part, thanks to a family friendship with Noam Chomsky, I became, I learned that there was this subject called linguistics, and I started reading books at a very young age about linguistics. And so I can't really remember a time when I wanted to do something other than that. Oh, wow. Which is, in particular, I should say, the debtor, the better.

And so ultimately, in fact, that at Princeton, I was, as you said, the Coateson professor in the humanities, also a professor of classics is not terribly surprising. The odd thing is that I was also not a professor of linguistics, but that's because Princeton, to its shame, and there are many shames to Princeton, does not have a department of linguistics. It was director of the program for a while. Oh, I wondered about that. Okay, I wonder why you weren't a professor of linguistics. I guess I'd always thought of you as a classicist because I don't know why, but that's why I'd always thought of you'd at. And then I was surprised to learn your background in linguistics, That is interesting.

And then, in fact, and, you know, traditional linguistics, having, being talented, as you pointed out in mathematics is an advantage. I know, Nome, as you know, probably know as an old friend of mine and as well in many years. And obviously, having tried every now and then to pour through some traditional linguistics, the logic aspect of it is very mathematical. Absolutely. So I was interested in math. I was interested in philosophical logic.

I was also interested in as many linguists are in music. Interesting. All of those came together. But I should say that the classicists don't believe that I'm a linguist, and the linguists don't believe that I'm a classicist. That's just what happens if you work. I used to work, I helped establish a field called particle astrophysics, but, and the particle physicists, sometimes you'd me as an astrophysicist,

and the astrophysic is a particle physicist. And one of my colleagues used to just call me a half astrophysics. physicist. Anyway, but, and then you, and then you, you did your PhD in linguistics as well then. But you went, you went to England for a little while, right? I did. Marshall Scholar. I was. And then, and then came back to Harvard to do the linguistics. And then did you move right to Princeton? I did. I actually started at Princeton the semester before I had my PhD. Isn't that a lucky question? You're left until, as you know, I had to leave. Yeah, yeah, no. Okay, so that was always your dominant institution. No. Well, I, when I was at Harvard, I was in a program called the Society of Fellows that were a lot of people sort of spent their last terms as doing their PhD, actually having faculty positions elsewhere. In physics, it never happened. It wasn't, it was always, you know, grinding through one or two postdocs. But it's nice when people are recognized early on and you can do that. You did, to be sure,

got canceled out of, out of Princeton, for speaking out about a subject, ultimately, in my opinion, in your opinion, I think, for speaking out honestly about a subject having, you know, which was this fanaticism over apparent racism at the university, apparent rather than empirical, racism and having the courage to speak out about it caused a real controversy and ultimately led to the university finding an excuse to terminate you. Would you say, would you agree with that? That is, that is accurate. And we have a lot, I mean, in the book, we have a number of people who have been canceled, who write about their experiences. And the key point is that universities will find an argument, no matter how bad, to do what they want to do, right?

regardless of such ephemeral concepts as academic freedom or fairness or due process or anything else. And in spite of, by the way, having, as far as I know, being one of the more popular professors and teachers at the university, which I'm sure the university extremely valued until they decided that it would be more expedient not to value it. I think that's right. I think it's fair to say that I was one of the most popular professors at Princeton until overnight I became the least hostile to it happened overnight and that's not just a metaphor. Yes, yes.

Overnight. That's what happens and it's amazing how things can switch in academia and well, and the fact that that can happen makes it clear that things aren't based on sound reasoning, evidence, empirical argument or or discussion, which should be the basis of decision-making universities and should be the basis of all scholarship. The fact that things... The war on science.

It's exactly. It is a war on science and your own experience as part of it. But happily, we're going to talk about another war that you guys are both concerned about. But before we get there, I want to talk to Salve. Hello? Who I know, unlike you, was, as far as I can tell, always wedded to the classic.

Well, you were wedded to many things, but I know that Solvei did our undergraduate degree in Princeton, in classics. I assume while you were there, and then a PhD in Cambridge, right, in classics. That's right. Why classics? You know, I fell in love with classics. Well, with Latin in particular as a child, in part because I heard a lot of it at church.

I was going to say your parents didn't speak it at home, did they? No, unfortunately. Would that they did. But no, you know, there was always Latin in the music. that we listened to in a church. And I started Latin in sixth grade. And my sixth grade teacher memorably told my parents that I had a bright future in Latin,

which my parents always thought was a. That's a dead language. They might have concerned about it. Exactly. And it was always just a subject I liked at school. Then I had a teacher who encouraged me to get into Latin recitation. And I did a number of Latin recitation contests.

And I was pretty successful at those. I also did some Latin dramas, Semicist diastes in Latin in high school. And through that, I actually got to meet Joshua's first wife, who was very involved in that world. And she encouraged me to apply to Princeton. And at Princeton, I started taking Greek and I was continuing with classics, but I was also flirting with other subjects. I was really interested in philosophy. But at the end of the day, I realized I could do philosophy in classics. Classics we talk about in our chapters, an interdisciplinary subject and allows you to do all sorts of things.

So I liked that I could do philosophy and languages at the same time. And yeah, I wasn't set on being an academic like Joshua was, but I met a lot of really stupid classics PhD students. And I thought, well, if these people are getting PhDs, I want to get a lot of. one too, just so I can say I have one as well. And I went to Cambridge for an M-Phil, thought if I liked it enough, I would stay for the PhD. I loved it. Stayed. To this day, I think Cambridge Classics faculty is one of the few relatively sane places out there. So I had a wonderful few years there before returning to Princeton where things were a lot darker. Yes, things, yeah, a lot darker. Well, you know, okay, that's interesting.

that you, wow, you know, I took three years of Latin and I, back in the days, and it's sad, as you probably know, that Latin, it's amazing that you had a six grade six class in Latin. The mind it wasn't, first Latin class was not until grade nine. I grew up in Canada, so we had 13 grades of high school. So long time, but, and I, and I, I mean, it's something, you know, I wish we'd had Greek, but certainly Latin was remarkable. But I think after three years proceeded to the point where I might have almost had a conversation, for about two minutes, maybe, if I was lucky, but it was still amazing.

It was remarkable for me to finally read, which is really what we'll get to the question of philology, and I really hit home for me because, of course, I'd read classic texts that had been in Latin in English, and when we were able to just look at a few texts and read them in Latin and suddenly get a different perspective of what was really happening, it was an eye-opening experience for me and a lovely one so I can understand the attraction of really beginning to try and get your head into the, begin to suspect what you understood what was like to live a few thousand years ago. It's amazing to me. And of course, also to discover that the more things change, the more they stay the same in many ways, which was also for me. When you decide to

rename the podcast, Originaise, you can have us like on and we'll do it in Latin, see whether you just do a couple of minutes of it. Okay, we'll see what we can do. I must say, I can be bought, just so you know, in case that, you know, in case you want. But yeah, it's, and I want to talk about now the article, the apology, the apology, and I have to say some people, you know, the book is called The War on Science. Why have a, why have an article like this? And we've talked about it. I've talked about the pub with the publisher. There are number of reasons, but this, but, you know, science to me is a, is sort of reason and empiricism and critical inquiry, real critical inquiry. And that's all the science is.

And what you're talking about in many ways is just that. But also classics, I tend to think of it as the basis of velocity, which is the basis of science in many ways. And so it's a natural, the fact that a discipline that explores the earliest inklings of critical analysis and also poetry and creativity itself as being attacked is really a fundamental attack of the basic scholarship on which all of academia and science as well is based. So it's perfectly reasonable to me and I'm happy you're a part of it. Now, basically the war on science is a war on evidence-based inquiry and research and there's a chapter about evidence. Exactly. And exactly. And to let's go there. Let me read the first paragraph of, or actually part of the first paragraph of your

piece, which opens with a shocker. I mean, just an amazing shocker. In a bid to increase enrollment, especially of students of color, the Princeton Department of Classics in the spring of 2021 made the now infamous decision to eliminate its language requirement for undergraduate majors, those students could graduate with a degree in classics without ever taking a single course in Latin or Greek. And he says, as the linguist, John McWhorter put it, the Princeton Classics Department's new position is tantamount to saying that Latin and Greek are too hard to require black students to learn them. The decision often left people scratching their heads. What does it mean to do classics throughout the languages? And I have no idea. What the heck does it mean

to do classics throughout the languages? I mean, can you imagine other than the argument about the argument that disparages or demean certain people. Other than that, is there any good argument for how you can do classics without the languages? I think it's very difficult. You know, you can, the fact is that the languages have always been considered central to all the many interdisciplinary parts of classics. So you might say, well, gee, maybe you don't have to know the language. if you're a classical archaeologist.

But then you remember that archaeologists do things like dig up inscriptions. And then you think, well, gee, maybe you better know them. Or, well, you know, maybe you don't need to know the languages if you're interested in philosophy. But then, of course, that's crazy because philosophy is all about the nuances of words, right? Yeah, yeah. How are you going to make that work if you don't know? what the original, what the so-called original looks like. And we can go through all the subfields of classics.

And sure, some of them are more linguistic-y, or more language-oriented, are more philological than others. But ultimately, boy, it's really hard to do it if you have no linguistic skills whatsoever. Okay. Now, it also means that... Good. I figured you might add something. Go ahead. No, it means that classics as a discipline then has no...

unifying theme. I mean, there's, there's no reason that the ancient historians have to be in a classics department.

They could be in a history department, right? There's no reason that the classical archaeologists need to be within the umbrella of classics. There's no reason that the classical art historians

shouldn't just be in our history department or the ancient philosophers be in a philosophy department. All of these people could be in disparate departments, but we have decided that there is a benefit to having an interdisciplinary

subject called classics. But the only only thing that makes that discipline cohesive is if there is a certain set body of knowledge that all those people share. And what that knowledge has always been has been the languages and specifically the methodology known as philology. Well, okay, now you've made a great segwriter. I was going to ask the next question, which is the title of the article isn't an apology for classics. It's called an apology for philology. So what is, what is, as you asked the question yourself in the article, What is classical philology? Feel free.

Well, so let's start with philology itself. So classical philology is philology of the so-called classical languages, which for the purposes of this conversation, let's call ancient Greek and Latin. And if you want to talk about what that means, of course, we can do that. The term philology is problematic, if I can use an adjective that has all sorts of connotations that one doesn't really want these days, but it's problematic because many different people over many centuries and in different countries have used it in different ways. But if I may quote ourselves in the article, we start on the first page with what we consider the definition to be, or at least the definition for the purposes of this article. And I'm just going to read that, and we can talk about that if you want.

I would have read it if you hadn't, so that's good. I'll read it, right? So philology, as we were trained to do it, in fact, we write classical philology, but then again, that's philology of the classics. Philology as we were trained to do it is the attempt to understand a text as it was produced in its historical context with as few anachronistic preconceptions as possible. So to put bluntly, philology is the art of reading carefully. Reading carefully. And you say, in fact, that's so central, was philology to the discipline of classics, that the Society for Classical Studies, which is the main Lurgeon Society from 1869, 2014, was called the American Philological Association.

Exactly. It was called the American Philological Association, and there was a big debate about whether to change the name. It was a very close vote, but ultimately the name was changed to the Society for Classical Studies. To be fair, there's nothing terribly wrong with being called the Society for Classical Studies, except very amusingly that now people are worried about the word classical, because after all, what about classical Chinese? What about classical Maya? What about classical music? What about Shakespeare as a classics? And so on, besides, what is a classic? So, in fact, there's a real mess here. Basically, one should... Absolutely. It's clearly a supremacist concept, though. Anyway, but if you point out, philology is no law. If you point out, philology is

no longer the core of classics. And it's been replaced by form of activist teaching and research bolstered by a million dollar grant to two professors, one at Brown and one at Princeton, for their initiative racing in the classics, which I originally would have thought, okay, let's do, let's read them quickly. But that prizes such concerns as identity, race, gender, et cetera, politics, the environment. And I, and I want to quote this, before we go on next. I mean, I just, I love, some of these quotes amaze me from this book, Critical Ancient World Studies, the case for forgetting classics, case for forgetting classics, critiques the field's Eurocentricism and refuses to inherit silently a field crafted so as

constitute a mythical prehistory for the imagined West. It rejects the assumption of an axiomatic relationship between so-called classics and cultural value. It denies positivist accounts of history and all modes of investigation that aim at establishing a perspective that is neutral or transparent and commits instead to showcasing the contingency of history and historiography in a way that is alert to the injustices and epistemologies of power that have shaped the way certain kinds of knowledge have been constructed as, quote, objective within the discipline known as classics. It requires those who participate in a commitment to decolonizing the gaze of and at antiquity. These buzzwords

of decolonization and the idea of that certain kinds of knowledge are constructed, which is really central to many things in this book, the attack on knowledge itself as if it's ephemeral. And frankly, which, as I've often alluded to when I taught at Yale on what's called Science Hill, which very few people ever went up to at Yale, where the science departments were, we used to look down at the deconstructionists in the English department and who talked like that, and we said, it can never happen here, but it has. So I just want to add one thing, and that is that you, as you

said, this quotation is from a book whose subtitle is the case for forgetting classics. And it's important to note that the editors and at least the vast majority of contributors to it are themselves classicists or credential

classicists or people who work in classics departments. So this is a very remarkable thing. It's not that the core is now this rather than philology, it's that there's kind of no core anymore because so many people who are inside the discipline are convinced that the discipline must be destroyed. They, of course, don't want to lose their jobs themselves. And they sit in the comfort of their, you know, tenured positions or tenure track positions at nice elite universities, while at less elite

universities, classics departments are getting slashed left and right. So there are plenty of people who deserve their positions for whom there are no positions left. And these people can sit comfortably in their positions and talk about why we need to forget the discipline altogether. It's a really good point because that title was forgetting classics, but there's another quote here which breaks me up. This is now, it's not something about forgetting classes. It's an analysis of classical text. And I'll read it and I'll try not to laugh. Through a combination of Audre Lord's black queer lens and Paul Presidio, I think I've got that right, maybe not, trans scholarship on the dildo, I further argue that by imagining simulus as black, queer,

and or trans, the power imbalance between simulus and is it Ciballi is greatly introduced, is greatly reduced. I mean, just balderdash. And that's, that's classics now, right? I mean, that's. Right. So, so the, the point we're making here is, is that you either have people not doing classics and instead just spending all their time talking about classics and why we need to forget about classics, or you have people doing classics where doing classics looks like that. It means trans scholarship on the DILDA. Right.

Yeah. The phrase that I never expected to speak in any contacts, much less on a podcast. Yeah, I know. It's amazing that put those words together. If you'd asked a random generator to do that with the English language, it would have taken a long time. But now, the bulk of the rest of the article is really about about the attack on philology and the different arguments against it. And the first one you point out is philology's racist paths. So why don't you address it and then address the obvious argument

why that's not a problem. But okay. Right. So well, I should say for starters that we had a lot of fun reconstructing the arguments against philology because as you can tell, even just from the quotes you've already read. the way these scholars write is complete gibberish. It's just word salad upon word salad. So, you know, there are all of these articles that are cited over and over again as the seminal articles on, you know, what's wrong with classics and why classics needs to die a slow, well, quick, painful death. And yet when you actually sit down and read these articles, as we did, you find that there is no kind of clear argumentation.

and they're not making obvious claims. And so we had to really reconstruct their arguments against philology in order to then produce this counter. So we have broken their arguments down into three. As you say, the first is the fact that philology has a racist past. Okay, yes, philology was practiced by people who were slaveholders. imperialists, sure. So is every other academic discipline, every valuable field of inquiry. This is not really an interesting criticism of any field unless you can prove that for some reason the field itself is intrinsically racist, that you cannot possibly separate the field from its racist past.

And they do try to make that point as well. And that brings us to point two, whether you want to go on. Before you get to point two, you just reminded me of something for my to show I have some classical background. When I, when I, I guess I read, I think it's Plutarch's lives and when I was young and I loved his ancient history. I still do. One of the things that shocked me at the time was one of the examples again of learning how

what you think is normal is not normal. necessarily. It's not normal over, not time invariant anyway. And in a time of celebrity, it was a real eye-opener for me when I was a young person in high school, I guess, to learn that at least at certain times, in Rome at least, and other, and Greece, I suppose, but there was a huge separation between the art and the artist. That, that, you know, in some ways they viewed the artist or the writer as just a, you know, a portal for divine influence, but not necessarily themselves to be revered, their work to be loved. And it was a shock to me.

And I thought, wow, that's really fascinating. And what we're seeing here with this philacist's passing is, of course, it's kind of ironic because it's the opposite, right? Somehow you can't read anyone unless you find out if they're a good father or husband or whatever, instead of listening to what they say. And it's a remarkable argument that somehow, unless you like someone, then what they say is is not worth reading. And it's just shocking, but new.

And that's your argument against racism is against the silliness of this argument about its racist past is clear. But I know Jocka is eager to talk about the second thing, which is. I'm eager to talk about anything. Can I just say, though, on the first point again, there are scholars right now who are considered beyond the pale, not just me. And we know that there are classicists out there who will not cite them as a result of this, right? They will do anything possible not to cite them, even when there is no possible way that they could legitimately get away without citing them.

But in fact, you know, you can't cite somebody who's a bad person. I mean, never mind that often these bad people are good people. But the idea that you can't. cite somebody's important work, which in any other context would be considered an academic violation not to cite. The fact that you can do that, it's pretty remarkable. Yeah, you know, it's interesting, and we'll connect this, because I just finished talking to Alex Sperna-Modigorn about gender arguments in philosophy and bioethics. And there are people overtly say in the literature, we are not going to cite these people because we don't like that, basically. And it's shocking. It's shocking that that could get through a journal and be accepted in their peer review.

And perhaps most sinister of all we know of cases of people just scrubbing certain scholars from their acknowledgments. So, you know, scholars who actively helped a student publish, you know, write their dissertation and then from the finished manuscript to get the scholars entirely purged. Yeah. And it's almost, it verges on plagiarism in the sense of, you're talking about an idea that's been debated and you don't, and you don't cite. people who've made important contributions, you could argue that's plagiarism. It's certainly not proper scholarship, anyway. By the way, that's why I like physics, because you don't have to cite anyone if you're Richard Feynman. Anyway, but the next argument is it's intrinsic whiteness.

And you quote this guy Rankin from 2019, which, again, I will read the quote because it's so remarkable to me. The race neutral colorblind position was simply an unconscious strategy of concealment. that is repressing the Oedipal secret of your identity, which is hidden in plain sight. And it might never occur to you that your ability to read and write about Euripides, unimpeded by anything but the text, manuscripts, and your outstanding philological training owes to your racial identity, your whiteness. And so somehow whiteness makes the field not real. So I'll turn it over to you. That's right.

So philology is supposed to be the closest you could get to a scientific exercise in the humanities. The goal is objectivity, right, that you are trying to analyze a text with as few anachronistic preconceptions as possible. You're looking at, you know, some ancient text. You're looking at the words of that text and you're saying, okay, well, I would translate this word this way. but, you know, maybe I'm translating this as, you know, equality when that's not what is actually meant here. And I'm bringing to this word, you know, a whole bag, whole baggage worth of, you know, 200, 2,000 years of baggage to the word equality that's meant by Aristotle. So you're supposed to be looking at the words as objectively as possible without all the historical baggage. What Rankin and his friends are saying is that it's, you know, that we are so embedded in our culture of whiteness that we don't realize that this objectivity doesn't exist.

We think we're being objective when really everything we do is colored by our whiteness. Right. Right. And there is, there is, and this is very important to stress. absolutely no evidence in Rankin's papers for this. It's merely asserted. And as we discuss in the chapter, he has a few comments, one of which is not, in fact, even a passing comment in favor of his assertion. And these comments are, if you look at them carefully and follow the sources, complete nonsense. So I suppose in print,

principle, one could imagine that a reading of Euripides, he talks about Euripides, a reading of Euripides might be colored by whiteness. I mean, I don't know what it would mean, but I'm willing to entertain the possibility that that could be a real thing. But neither Rankin nor anyone else, to my knowledge, has ever demonstrated anything that comes even close to this. And yet, Rankin's article is treated as gospel by all the other scholars. So, you know, Rankin is able to, I don't know if you want to get into the specific example that he gives, but, you know, Rankin has a couple of footnotes where he says, well, you know, here's this scholar, or here's this example of racism. Here's this example of racism. That's all he gives, just this couple of footnotes Joshua alluded to. Then he publishes this article. And then this article is cited over and over again by scholars throughout the field of classics to, as evidence. that philology is indeed intrinsically white and therefore intrinsically racist.

And, you know, this is what Peter Bogosian would call ideal laundering. Certainly a variation on ideal laundering. Yeah. You take this really flimsy argument and all of a sudden the entire field is willing to buy that... It is interesting how what happens is someone makes a claim and then someone, that claim and then and then someone quotes the quote of the claim and there's a lot of citations. Right. And again, we said, what?

Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt that. Well, I was just going to say, again, to connect this, the interesting thing about gender affirming care is the claim that it somehow reduces suicides. And as we just discussed it recently with Alex and Modi, there's really no evidence. All the articles that are supposedly cited don't say anything about it. And therefore, all you get are citations with people making that claim, including all the way up to last Biden administration. But anyway, go on.

Here's what I want people to take away from this chapter and from this podcast. You may not care at all about classics. But as we said at the beginning, philology is about reading carefully. And what we try to show in this chapter is that the scholars who are writing stuff are themselves. extremely bad readers. And then you're a readers of them who are extremely bad readers and don't go and check anything. And then readers of the, as you just pointed, readers of the readers of the readers. And so these various ideas that are perhaps nonsense or at the very least have no obvious pieces of evidence behind them, just get recycled and continued and treated as gospel.

So the point of philology here is not that you have to care about what Plato said or what Homer said or what Cicero said. Maybe you're sure. But that's not the point. The point is that at every level, whether we're talking about the 8th century BC or the 8th century of this era or of the year 2025, the critical point to understand is you've got to be able to read carefully in order to make an argument. people aren't doing it. Exactly. And you know, you point out, I mean, just to drive this point home a little more carefully, you know, I used to study history. And so it's obvious, when you talk about history, it's obvious that historians see the past influenced by the present. And they, and the point is to work very, very hard to first of acknowledge that and to try and overcome it, to try and be as objective as possible and recognize the realities. And And your pull point, I think, is that good

philology, you say it, forces us to acknowledge precisely the biases that Rankin seems to believe it actively conceals. Namely, anyone like yourselves will know that when you regret you're going to project onto it, and you try and accept that and even probably reference it in your work. And the whole point of it

is to not ignore it, but to ask how it might be impacting on your ideas. I would think it's central. rather than concealing, I would think it would be central to good philology, as you talk about, not bad philology. And I think that's an incredibly important point. And then you give an example, and there are lots of things, and I encourage people to read this. But I was surprised, there's one example that I want to go into, which you talk about, where Rank and Misresemps represents his source in, as you say, an active intellectual.

sexual sloppiness or dishonesty, you don't argue either. But I'll just start it and then, and then I'll let you go on. He say, Rankin's argument, I'm not going to read what he said. As we understand it is that 19th century grammar books translated service or serwis. Serwis, I was going to say, I know I'm saying it wrong. Sir was slave, a servant which allowed students to read about the ancient world without having to conform to confront the reality of slavery in their own time. And then I'll ask you to elaborate on this, But you say there's no mention, however, anyone nowadays teaching Sirwis or Servo, I don't know, you, whatever, a servant. More important, though, there's scarcely any mention of Seruus being translated as servant in the 19th century.

So the whole point is not there. So you want to elaborate? Yeah, you take that one. Yeah, I mean, you know, this was really fun to discover this because we were reading Rankin's article. And I said, you know what, let's just check these footnotes. And we checked them and we could not believe what we found. Namely, you know, he claims that this article, it was at the time unpublished, it's now published so you can see the article.

But he claims that the article, you know, says all these things about the translation of Serwus's servant and, you know, how this has, how this had an impact on people during the time of slavery and how it has an impact on students today. And then we look at the article and in fact, you know, the only mention of Seruus's servant is in like passing. And it's the the book that McCloskey, the author of the article is talking about, uses both slave and servant interchangeably. There's no strong emphasis on servant. And more importantly, McCoskey's whole point is that these books from the 19th century were actually much better about discussing the realities of slavery than our books are today. And that one book was, in fact, an abolitionist book.

Yes, it was an abolitionist book. That's right. So, you know, the idea that, you know, the night, that this is somehow embedded in, in philology, you know, from the early days that Seruos should be talking about servants rather than slaves and that, you know, we're trying to obfuscate. the realities of slavery. It's complete nonsense and there's no evidence for it. And, you know, he also provides new evidence of this going on today. So, you know, we're willing to buy that maybe there are such examples, but he hasn't cited it. Then now. There might be examples then. Yeah.

But he certainly doesn't cite them and she doesn't cite them. And her article is entirely about that. And he doesn't cite any examples now. So sure, as Solve just said, maybe, maybe there's an argument here to be made, but there's not so much as a hint of that argument. And the other aspect, by the way, which we've glossed over a little bit, which you say in your piece just before this, which I think is not only, you know, there aren't examples necessarily white supremacismist's misreadings of your parties, but I think it's an important point. We don't see evidence that even that the impossibility of fully unracing ourselves actually

does have a significant impact on philological scholarship, namely that the central issue that somehow we're governed by whiteness or race, that if there's no clear evidence that working to unwhiten ourselves or whatever, depending upon our race, does, makes any difference. Yeah. And I don't think they give an example, or at least if they do, it seemed, well, I don't know, do they? No, I mean, they don't.

And one of the odd things here, too, is that, in fact, this is about language learning books. This isn't even really an example of philology. So if the concern is, you know, that the method of philology, which is, you know, a scholarly method used to produce original research, that that method is implicated, you know, not only is this example of that example, it's also just not even an example of philology. And the same is true of the other example he cites as well, which is an example of anthropology being used in classics, not of the philological method. And I think we found this again and again in these articles that we were looking at, that the scholars seem to use philology to talk about all sorts of things within the field of classics. And most specifically talk about-philology is bad.

Yeah, exactly. Philology equals bad. You see the word philology bad. And they were saying, you know, it was a lot about language learning and not actually about the practice of philology. And I mean, when you see the kind of work that Rankin himself does as a philologist, you think, well, maybe this is he doesn't actually understand. understand what philology is or is supposed to be because, you know, I guess this is how he writes about it and this is how he practices it. But yeah, it's, it's, it's odd. And again, it's kind of shocking that the seminal piece on the evils of philology could have such poor support.

Okay. Well, now we've, we've burned that bridge. Let's go to philology's weaponization, which is the last thing you talk about. And then important. aspect, which is hitting many fields, not just philology, even mathematics, which always amazes me. But, you know, the idea that philology, quote, pretends to be neutral and disinvested the test of intelligence associated with ideas like merit, rigor, and excellence, which are equated with white supremacy or whatever. And you quote, Eccleston and your I guess former colleague Padilla Peralta, the presumptive rigor of philology functioned as much more than a mode or metzenem of exclusionary elitism throughout the field. Institutional gatekeepers

levied it as a slur that effectively sidelined black or brown-centered methodologies, especially in reception studies as me search. The idea that somehow merit, rigor, and excellent equal bad. And, you know, we want to add to that at all? Yeah, well, I think it's fair to say that the first real sign that something was a foul in the Princeton Classics Department came in 2018, the very beginning of 2018. Yes, when the faculty was trying to develop a new mission statement. This is not, in fact, my story to tell Joshua should tell this story. Well, the short version of this story is that in late 2017, early 2018, my colleagues decided to create

a new mission statement for the Department of Classics. I was fortunately on leave, so I didn't have much to do with this, but a draft was circulated, and I made the mistake of writing to everybody in the department about this draft and saying that it seemed to me a little bit odd that we weren't saying anything about excellence. We were saying what sorts of students we wanted, but there was no indication from it that we wanted students who were good, you know, who were actually excellent. or that we wanted to train students to be good, to be excellent. And unfortunately, I used the word excellence. The result of which is that a few of my then now former colleagues started writing

to everybody about how I was clearly a crypto-fascist or maybe dropped the crypto. No, it wasn't that bad yet. It became really bad really quickly. Because, of course, how could I not understand that using a word like excellence was a sign that I was a white, it was dog whistle and that word was used because of course that means white supremacy. That's when you know, that's when you know this game is over. So we call the third point in our chapter of philology's weaponization. It's a weaponization against things like merit and excellence and a weaponization in favor of, I don't know what you're going to call it anti-merit. I mean, I don't think they call it equity now.

Yeah, actually, if you like, a word that should have been used outside economics. Yeah. Well, as we'll get now here, I'm going to give you guys the last word in a way. I'm going to read some of the last words of your piece and then ask you a comment, but I'll read it because I think it's, well, I like it. Anyway, we are apologists for philology, but we do not believe that philology is the only worthy way to do classics. We would, however, like to see excellence across the board.

This means maintaining high standards in both language instruction and scholarship. Students should be competent in Greek and Latin, and scholars at all levels should be expected to marshal correctly cited evidence creatively to make valid and ideally also sound arguments in a comprehensible way. This comprehensibility matters precisely because it was what makes the scholarship accessible to non-specialists. That is to say, what makes it not exclusionary or elitist. still no not everyone can do it excellence necessarily excludes and this you know what amazed when i when i was reading this just now it hadn't hit me before but except for maybe the last sentence where people wouldn't have said that that statement could have been the the statement you'd read about in a in a

university handbook about the fields about what you're trying to do and and the idea that that statement could be controversial is is is the problem it seems to me of course but i don't think the last sentence is uh is is is odd either i don't i i think it's absolutely right but i don't we're good to be physics i there is no way that i could have been an excellent physicist no no i no there's no way look what i mean by that is it was obvious but implicit i don't think you would have read in the handbook that by the way we don't want you because you're not good enough but um but that was inherent i mean as our universities are not democracies, they're meritocracies, or they should be. And excellence means, you know,

excellence. And not everyone is excellent in everything. There are very few people who are. And I'm not sure anyone is, I'm sure no one is excellent at everything. And so it is necessary exclusionary. I just meant it wouldn't have been something you would have proclaimed. It would have just been implicit. But it's fine to be a student and an undergraduate student in a subject. And and not be excellent. But you should not be told, oh, well, actually, you're really great if you're not. And probably more to the point here,

the job of instructors is to try to make you better. And by saying, for example, that you don't have to know the core stuff in a given field, well, then of course the people aren't going to be better, much less excellent. It's a disservice. And so I think what you're arguing, I mean, your apology for us is to say, you know, if these are going to be scholarly fields,

they have to be scholarly. And the same is true for science, classics, any field of study. And by the way, I mean, to be fair, I should also say that, you know, excellence, excellence arises in many different ways, in many surprising ways. And, you know, I know in physics, Nobel Prize winners who were not the best mathematician in their class, but they had some other skill that came out. And so, you know, students should realize that they don't have to be the best in one thing to be good. A lot of it is hard work and finding the areas where you are excellent. But if you're not given the opportunity

or encouragement to explore the areas in which you might excel, you're not doing yourself or anyone else any service. And the university is not doing any service in it in educating you. In fact, it's not educating you at all. And, well, I don't want to have the last word. I tried to summarize what you say, but if you want to, if you want to add anything else now, it's a, it's a, I think a very important piece. And I do appreciate, well, I always learn from these things, but, but I really appreciate the importance. Because again, classics is the basis at some level, in my opinion, of all subsequent knowledge. And if, and if you're hitting the basis of it, then, then at least, yeah, well, all subsequent knowledge in the West and anyway. So

And our argument would be that philology is the core of classics, which you have just called a certain kind of core. But I want to reemphasize a sentence of ours that you quoted. We write, we are apologists for philology, but we do not believe that philology is the only worthy way to do classics. Unquestionably, people are going to say, well, of course cats and gold are interested in philology because they're a philologist. Of course, they're going to pick. on all the other forms of doing classics. So I want to make very clear that that is something we are explicitly not doing because people are going to accuse us of doing this. The fact is that we believe that philology is central. But another fact is... We do believe it's better, but that's... Well, I'm allowed to believe it.

Who knows? But the fact is it is central. And so therefore, in some sense, I don't know if I want to use the word better, but extraordinarily important. But I'm not now going to claim that people who specialize extremely well in other forms of classics should actually become philologists. Of course, they shouldn't. They should find the thing that they can do best. But not knowing any Latin, not knowing any Greek, not knowing, say, anything aside from English of the 21st century, that's just indefous.

Well, that's a wonderful way to summarize this. and I've really enjoyed the discussion. I knew I would. I wasn't worried about that. But I thank you for contributing to the book. And I thank you for coming on here and having this fun discussion. It was a real pleasure.

I hope it at some point in the future meet both of you in a three-dimensional world and instead of a two-dimensional one. That'll be great. Thanks for having us. Thank you. Thank you. Hi, it's Lawrence again.

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