Friction

Why do slurs offend even when you’re not using them to insult anyone, and what does that reveal about how meaning, context, and social norms actually work in language?

My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.

1. Guest

Ernest Lepore is a philosopher and cognitive scientist and a professor of philosophy at Rutgers University.

2. Interview Summary

Ernest Lepore opens by framing his book project as (mostly) about slurs and the puzzle of why they’re offensive in a way that seems resistant to tidy semantic explanation. He surveys familiar families of views: semantic accounts that try to locate the offense in conventional meaning (via things like presupposition- or expressivist-style mechanisms), and non-semantic accounts that treat the offense as grounded in broader social norms—e.g., “prohibition” approaches or association-based stories where two expressions can pick out the same thing while one carries a toxic social “tone.”

He then motivates a central distinction between what a speaker expresses and what they articulate—the idea that certain phonetic or graphic presentations can be offensive even when the speaker isn’t using, endorsing, or even mentioning the slur’s meaning. A key data point is that even “inert” meaning-attributions can still offend (e.g., trying to state what a slur “means”), and he emphasizes cases where people are offended by the mere production of a sound-pattern that matches a slur despite the speaker’s intent and despite the word’s being from another language (including a classroom example involving a Mandarin filler word at University of Southern California). He extends the point with analogies: expressions that merely resemble taboo slurs, and symbols whose form can trigger condemnation regardless of etymology or original use.

In the latter part of the interview, Lepore zooms out to broader metasemantic and metaphysical issues about language, including what words and expressions are supposed to be. He describes how work on quotation pushed him to revisit the “shape theory” tradition associated with figures like Donald Davidson and Alfred Tarski, and how David Kaplan’s critique both convinced him something was wrong and yet didn’t supply a satisfying alternative. He connects these issues to puzzles about reference-change (the “Madagascar” case), and to a larger theme he returns to near the end: post-1970s lessons from Saul Kripke / Hilary Putnam-style externalism suggesting we often don’t know what our words mean in the way philosophers once assumed—prompting interest in views on negotiation/amelioration (e.g., Sally Haslanger and others) where speakers can coordinate meaning “on the fly.”

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

00:50 - Pejoratives

08:39 - Framing the problem

13:59 - Pejoratives as not cancellable=

17:30 - Articulation account

21:43 - Pejoratives as entirely audience-dependent

25:02 - Too many pejoratives?

28:30 - Benefits of articulations account

34:12 - What about intentions?

37:02 - Relation to other features of language

39:36 - More general account?

44:44 - Language differences

46:26 - On Words

52:11 - Tolerance

54:37 - Abstracta articulations

57:29 - Gaps in philosophical literature and communication

1:05:17 - Stage-continuant view

1:10:25 - Shape-theory

1:12:50 - Semantic externalism and deference

1:17:37 - Using words without knowing the content

1:20:39 - Nathan Salmon’s view

1:25:29 - Scott Soames’ view

1:26:26 - Skepticism about the disagreement

1:29:18 - Rule-following

1:30:36 - Two-dimensionalism

1:32:14 - Propositions

1:33:57 - Taking things for granted

1:38:40 - Upcoming book on deference and communication

1:42:25 - Evolution of language

1:44:15 - Conclusion

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What does it take not just to do the right thing, but to do it virtuously—and what do achievement and anger reveal about the ethical costs of injustice?

My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.

1. Guest

Sukaina Hirji is assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania. Her philosophical research focuses primarily on ancient philosophy, Aristotelian ethics, and contemporary ethics.

2. Interview Summary

In this interview, Sukaina Hirji (Assistant Professor of Philosophy at University of Pennsylvania) reflects on why she finds philosophy valuable: it’s like an artform, involving creative puzzle-solving and the exercise of rational capacities, and its products can be both instrumentally useful and “beautiful” in their own right. The conversation then turns to her work on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, where she argues that we should distinguish between performing virtuous actions and acting virtuously: the same outward deed (like standing up to a bully) might count as a just action, yet fail to be “acting justly” if it’s done from the wrong motives (attention-seeking, mere conformity, etc.), whereas acting virtuously requires the right kind of understanding, desire, and affect toward the action.

From there, Hirji situates the distinction inside a broader Aristotelian picture of happiness: we should orient our lives toward the right conception of happiness, understood as the full realization of our ‘practical rationality’, which includes genuine responsiveness to ethical value—especially the well-being of others—rather than a narrow, single-minded focus on one’s own welfare. She also emphasizes why Aristotle needs the distinction in the first place: non-virtuous people can still perform virtuous actions (that’s part of how they become virtuous), but they can’t yet act virtuously, since that requires the right settled character and the right “way” of acting.

In the second half, the discussion shifts to Hirji’s contemporary ethical work. She critiques a perfectionist approach to the value of achievement (associated with Gwen Bradford and sometimes linked to Friedrich Nietzsche-style emphasis on willpower), arguing that difficulty can matter in more than one way—and that we shouldn’t accept the uncomfortable implication that deprivation automatically makes achievements more valuable. Using Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own thought experiment about William Shakespeare’s equally talented sister, she proposes an account on which achievement is valuable partly insofar as it expresses an agent’s capacities—and oppressive external conditions can rob someone of the opportunity to realize what they’re capable of. She then sketches a related project on anger in political injustice: drawing on Maria Lugones, she distinguishes ‘reform anger’ (aimed at accountability and reintegration within a shared moral community) from ‘outrage anger’ (a kind of “second-order” anger that can arise when serious harms are dismissed or rendered unintelligible, and that instead helps carve out solidarity and a separate moral space among those targeted by injustice).

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

00:48 - Virtuous actions and acting virtuously

07:52 - Aristotle as egoistic?

12:31 - Spelling out the difference

14:06 - Historical philosophical analysis

19:40 - Value of ancient philosophy

21:11 - Aristotelian ethics today

25:29 - Have the questions changed?

30:06 - Difficulty and achievement

37:31 - Criticism of Bradford’s account

38:21 - Hypothetical case

44:01 - Achieving vs. product of achievement

48:15 - Intrinsic value

51:08 - Achievement and desire

55:08 - Reasons to believe in intrinsic value

58:59 - Double binds

1:02:32 - Example

1:03:58 - Oppression

1:06:49 - Overfitting

1:10:53 - Oppressive and homeostatic structures

1:13:19 - Dealing with double binds

1:16:21 - Outrage

1:21:35 - Value of philosophy

1:24:37 - Conclusion

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Do we need a single, primitive “Grounding” relation to explain metaphysical dependence, or can a plural toolkit of more specific relations do the job while still making sense of emergence and physicalism?

My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.

1. Guest

Jessica Wilson is Professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto Scarborough. Her area of research focuses on a range of topics in metaphysics, from grounding, emergence, causation, and more, as well as the philosophy of mind, epistemology, and metaphilosophy.

2. Interview Summary

Jessica Wilson begins by distinguishing “big-G Grounding” from the many specific “small-g” metaphysical dependence relations philosophers already use. Big-G Grounding is meant to be a primitive, generic dependence relation that applies across any context, whereas small-g relations include more “off-the-shelf” resources (realization, part–whole, conjunction/disjunction, etc.) that can already do substantive metaphysical work. Wilson’s skepticism isn’t skepticism about metaphysical dependence in general, but about whether we need a single primitive generic relation over and above a plural toolkit of specific dependence relations, especially once we compare full “package deals” about metaphysical structure (what’s fundamental, and how the non-fundamental depends on it).

On her preferred “fundamental-first” package, what counts as fundamental is a worldly matter rather than a mere stipulation, though our methodology often starts with working hypotheses (for example, “suppose the cosmos is fundamental” or “suppose microphysical goings-on are fundamental”) to see how well an overall picture accommodates case studies and scientific commitments. She emphasizes that debates like monism versus atomism can be assessed using broadly abductive criteria (the same style of reasoning used across science and philosophy), while also urging intellectual humility: we are not in a position to declare major methodological theses decisively settled, and we should acknowledge the provisional status of many commitments while still treating “conditional knowledge” as real progress.

A major stretch of the interview then connects methodological assumptions to emergence and physicalism. Wilson unpacks David Hume’s dictum by explaining why it is often restricted to “distinct, intrinsically typed” existences (so it won’t be trivially falsified by cases where something is defined in terms of relations to something else). She distinguishes weak from strong metaphysical emergence: weak emergence involves complete synchronic dependence plus a kind of autonomy, while strong emergence requires only partial dependence together with genuinely novel powers. She also argues that even weakly emergent phenomena can be “distinctively efficacious” not by adding new powers (which would threaten physicalism), but by having a distinctive subset power-profile that supports different explanatory and difference-making patterns, engaging the familiar overdetermination worry associated with Jaegwon Kim. Finally, on characterizing the physical, she sketches a response to “Campbell’s dilemma” by taking physics (present or idealized) as an extensional guide while adding a “no fundamental mentality” constraint, so that a future physics that posited fundamentally conscious entities would not automatically count them as “physical.”

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

00:42 - Conceptions of grounding

04:41 - Deciding between accounts

13:38 - Determining what is fundamental

18:10 - Skepticism about metaphysical theorizing

21:35 - Are disputes over fundamentality substantive?

28:28 - Making progress

31:03 - Hume’s dictum

33:44 - Hume’s dictum and emergence

42:09 - Why believe Hume’s dictum?

46:07 - Characterizing the physical

52:31 - Potential issue for this account

53:40 - Powers and emergence

58:34 - Causes specific to effects

59:59 - Overdetermination

1:04:12 - No fundamental level?

1:16:01 - Metaphysical modality?

1:19:59 - Indeterminate states of affairs

1:29:21 - Problems for Cartesian skepticism

1:33:40 - Epistemic contextualism

1:34:34 - Barriers to philosophical progress

1:40:49 - Conclusion

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If determinism rules out real alternatives, what could still make us genuinely responsible for what we do?

My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.

1. Guest

John Martin Fischer is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Riverside. His philosophical work focuses on free will, moral responsibility, as well as death, near-death experiences, immortality, and more.

2. Interview Summary

Fischer opens by laying out his long-standing “semi-compatibilist” (or “source compatibilist”) position: even if causal determinism rules out alternative possibilities, it can still leave intact the kind of agency needed for moral responsibility. In other words, his account of responsibility is meant to be independent of settling the classic “could you have done otherwise?” question, and he sketches this as the guiding thread connecting a lot of his work. He also flags a recurring cross-disciplinary problem: debates about “free will” (especially in neuroscience contexts) often get stuck because some participants build libertarian anti-determinism into the definition of free will, so they end up talking past philosophical views that treat the concept more flexibly.

From there, the conversation turns to the major families of arguments that pressure compatibilism: the Consequence Argument (via “fixity of the past” and “fixity of laws”) and various manipulation-style worries. Fischer treats these objections as genuinely powerful—worth taking seriously—even while resisting the conclusion that they defeat compatibilism. He argues that manipulation cases help isolate what incompatibilists find unsettling, but he thinks (with work and care) one can still draw principled differences between deterministic causation and the sort of covert “design/manipulation” that seems responsibility-undermining. This sets up his sustained defense of the idea—associated with Harry Frankfurt—that a person may be responsible even when they lack robust alternatives, and he notes how earlier predecessors (like John Locke’s locked-room case) anticipate the same basic intuition.

In the later portions, Fischer extends the “actual-sequence” style of thinking to theological puzzles—especially divine foreknowledge—emphasizing a structural parallel with determinism while also noting a key difference: foreknowledge needn’t be part of the causal flow that produces an action. He even suggests a provocative way to see things: if omniscient foreknowledge plus theological fatalism were true, we’d effectively be living inside a kind of Frankfurt-style setup where some factor blocks alternatives without entering the agent’s deliberation. The interview then shifts to death-related themes: near-death experiences are treated as real and recurrent human phenomena whose contents can vary with culture (e.g., different narrative imagery across societies), and Fischer suggests that studying them can illuminate how people understand death, how institutions might support the dying more humanely, and what they reveal about meaning in life. Finally, they discuss immortality: Fischer is drawn to a version that includes an “exit option,” and he brings in Bernard Williams-style reflections about whether “living forever” would remain desirable depending on the quality and shape of the life on offer.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

00:49 - Moral responsibility

02:53 - Free will vs. moral responsibility

06:04 - Disputes as not substantive

08:29 - Attacks on compatibilism

18:16 - Resolving disputes

23:55 - Another approach to free will

31:51 - Comparison to other problems

37:28 - Plausibility of Frankfurt cases

40:03 - Determinism

45:14 - Reductive analysis

47:22 - Determinism and modern physics

51:31 - Frankfurt cases

59:16 - Flickers of freedom

1:01:15 - Fixity of the past

1:08:16 - Criticisms of fixity

1:14:34 - Rational deliberation

1:17:19 - Historical development of free will

1:22:55 - Divine foreknowledge and free will

1:25:38 - Libertarian response

1:32:35 - God as not essentially omniscient

1:37:48 - Omniscience

1:49:56 - Limits to God’s knowledge

1:54:08 - First-order evidence as redundant

1:56:29 - How does it work?

2:04:38 - Perspective as an atheist

2:07:01 - Near-death experiences

2:12:41 - Pessimism about supernatural conclusions

2:15:24 - Worthwhile research?

2:18:05 - Immortality

2:22:23 - Irrational desires

2:25:01 - Pascal’s wager

2:30:10 - Badness of death

2:34:50 - Desires and the badness of death

2:40:11 - Suicide

2:42:57 - Meaning of life

2:53:42 - Value of philosophy

2:58:42 - Conclusion

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If freedom isn’t just about having options but about not living at someone else’s mercy, what does that imply for free will, responsibility, and the political institutions we should build?

My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.

1. Guest

Philip Pettit is Emeritus Professor of Politics and Human Values at Princeton University and Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the Australian National University, Canberra. He has written at great depth and breadth on philosophical topics, ranging from politics, ethics, the philosophy of mind, philosophy of action, metaphysics, and more.

2. Interview Summary

Pettit starts by separating political freedom from the classic ‘free will’ question: you can have social/political freedom (being unhampered by others) even if you took a hard line on determinism about the universe. But he also defends a compatibilist-friendly picture of free will that tries to explain why, in ordinary life, we say after the fact that someone “could have done otherwise” even in a scientifically law-governed world. His key move is to focus on the social practice of exhortation (“you can do it; you ought to do it”) and its internalized counterpart—self-exhortation. Exhorting someone isn’t just describing a capacity, and it isn’t a pure performative either; it’s “evocative” in the sense that it scaffolds and strengthens a person’s responsiveness to reasons. On this view, saying afterward “you could have done otherwise” is a kind of retrospective exhortation: it’s a way of continuing to treat someone as a fellow agent who can be brought into line with shared standards, rather than writing them off as helpless or alien to those standards.

From there he turns to his signature republican account of freedom as non-domination, contrasting it with (i) freedom as non-frustration (associated with Thomas Hobbes) and (ii) freedom as noninterference or “open doors” (associated with Isaiah Berlin). The point of non-domination is that it’s not enough that the doors happen to be open, or even that all doors are open: you aren’t fully free if there’s a “doorkeeper” who can arbitrarily slam them, making your options depend on someone else’s goodwill. He illustrates this with A Doll’s House: Nora may face little interference from Torvald, but she remains unfree because he stands in a position to control her. Pettit also stresses that domination comes in degrees (varying across people, choices, and kinds of interference), and he proposes rough diagnostic tests—like the “eyeball test” (whether people can meet one another without fear or deference), while acknowledging cultural variation in how that “spirit” gets expressed. Finally, he emphasizes that law and social norms can enable freedom by reducing dependence on others’ goodwill—e.g., workplace protections that prevent “firing at will” from putting employees under an employer’s thumb.

In the second half, Pettit broadens the lens to agency and ethical life. He gives a functional account of agency—systems with goals, representations, and action-guidance—and uses simple examples (like a robot vs. a sunflower) to motivate why genuine agents need flexible representation-guided control. He then argues (drawing on work with Christian List) that some collectives can literally count as agents too—churches, universities, governments—when they’re organized to form group-level judgments and goals and to coordinate members’ actions under those shared commitments. Along the way he briefly discusses moral psychology and a practical “red light” idea (linked to Michael Stocker): don’t become split in two between theory and inclination—often you can follow decent habits unless something signals that higher-stakes moral scrutiny is needed. He closes by rejecting the claim (raised via Stanley Fish) that philosophy stays in the seminar room: he describes his own work on the social nature of minds (including a forthcoming book with Oxford University Press) as reshaping how he values everyday social interaction, and he offers a concrete case where republican ideas traveled into politics—José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero drawing on republican principles and even inviting Pettit into a public role assessing the government’s performance against them.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

01:00 - Freedom vs. free will

04:04 - Free will

16:20 - Reasons-responsiveness

17:23 - Exaltation, libertarianism, and compatibilism

22:52 - Problems for libertarian free will

25:45 - Social freedom as non-domination

39:09 - Non-domination as a matter of degree

45:41 - Signs of domination

54:52 - Law and freedom

1:02:35 - Laws as a frail protection

1:04:52 - Agency and dispositions

1:10:17 - Group agents

1:12:30 - Group consciousness

1:21:52 - Justness, legitimacy, and consequentialism

1:32:05 - Relevance of philosophy

1:37:55 - Conclusion

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Can Buddhist and Daoist ideas about emptiness, no-self, and transformation be made philosophically rigorous without collapsing into nihilism or contradiction?

My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.

1. Guest

Jenny Hung is a visiting assistant professor at New York University, Abu Dhabi, and a postdoctoral fellow at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, working with Yao Zhihua. She has two PhDs, one in philosophy, another in nano-physics.

2. Interview Summary

Jenny Hung opens by pushing back on a common misreading of Buddhist ‘emptiness’ as nihilism: the tradition is goal-directed (nirvana, and reducing suffering), and its teachings are meant to be practically transformative, not merely theoretical. The first major segment focuses on her interpretation of Nagarjuna: the apparently paradoxical “everything is real / not real / both / neither” style claims are best understood not as violations of classical logic, but as pedagogical speech-acts whose surface contradictions arise from a listener’s false presupposition that things (and sentences) have intrinsic natures (svabhāva). She explains this in terms of a systematic mismatch between enlightened speaker and unenlightened audience: students “reify” language into a substance ontology, while the teaching is meant to undermine that very reification—so the point is to break the presupposition, not to endorse inconsistency.

The second segment turns to Yogācāra and a model of “no-self” that tries to make enlightenment psychologically intelligible rather than wholly mysterious. Drawing on Jean Piaget’s notion of cognitive schemas, Hung proposes that the ordinary sense of self is a learned organizing schema that structures experience into subject–object form; meditation can interrupt this structure. On her reconstruction, “no-self” experience is (at least temporarily) experience as pure sensation without perception—raw conscious episodes without the subject–object dichotomy—and repeated “in-and-out” exposure can train a stable no-self schema that still allows normal interaction afterward. She also defends reading ‘manas’ (the seventh consciousness) not as a constant occurrent thought, but as an always-operating psychological mechanism/schema that drops out in advanced meditative stages. Along the way, she distinguishes debates about reflexive awareness from the subject–object split, and she sketches two broad ways to read Yogācāra about the external world—an idealist “mind-only” reading versus a more Immanuel Kant-like “filtering” reading—while noting she leans idealist even though her paper’s main aim is the no-self model rather than full ontology.

The third segment discusses her work on Zhuangzi and a tension she sees in the text: Daoist “oneness” and process metaphysics (the world as dynamic transformation rather than independent substances) seems to undercut robust individual selves, yet famous stories (like the butterfly dream and the Lady Li death analogy) appear to presuppose a persisting subject who survives radical change. Hung’s strategy is to reconcile these by appealing to a “thin” subject of experience compatible with process metaphysics—helped by Galen Strawson’s way of combining process-friendly metaphysics with an insistence on experiential subjectivity. This lets her interpret claims like “I lost myself” as shifting between a thin ‘I’ (subjectivity) and a thicker, bodily/psychological self, and it also supports her discussion of Zhuangzian transformation—sometimes via a panpsychist-leaning reading that treats even strange transformations (into “box arms,” “rat livers,” etc.) as intelligible only if consciousness is more widely distributed than we typically assume.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

01:35 - Nagarjuna’s Catuskoti and the No-Thesis View

09:20 - Negative and positive Catuskoti

12:16 - Everything is real

16:07 - Everything is empty

20:38 - Rejecting substance ontology

23:13 - Better language?

26:58 - Conceptual fictions

30:25 - Connection to Russell

33:36 - Early Yogācāra theory of no-self

42:22 - No-self

46:19 - Raw experience

50:24 - Reflexive awareness

54:15 - Representationalism

56:20 - Nature of thought

1:00:53 - Perceptions as constructions

1:05:43 - Idealism

1:10:51 - Theory of the Self in the Zhuangzi

1:17:48 - Substantial self

1:19:39 - Thin notion of the self

1:22:41 - Transformation

1:25:55 - Galen Strawson

1:30:05 - Pain without things that have it

1:34:53 - Physics and philosophy

1:38:54 - Interpreting philosophy

1:42:37 - Limits to reconstruction

1:44:41 - Recommended reading

1:46:18 - Conclusion

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