Ian Olasov - Ask a Philosopher: Answers to Your Most Important and Most Unexpected Questions

One Saturday morning in April 2016a little cold, a little wet, surrounded by flowersI unfolded a table at the Grand Army Plaza farmers market, across the street from the central branch of the Brooklyn Public Library. For the next few hours, a handful of philosophy professors and grad students and I sat behind a banner that said ASK A PHILOSOPHER , and we waited for people to talk to us. Before long, they didabout God, the presidential election, Ayn Rand, keeping fish as pets, moral education, free will, destiny, the meaning of life, and a few other things. So we set up the booth again, and then another time, and then a few more times after that. In the years since, weve traveled all over New York City, to farmers markets, stores, subway stations, parks, book festivals, and street fairs. Its hard to describe how rewarding the whole experience has been. Ive met, for a few seconds or a couple of hours, thousands of weird, friendly, cranky, curious, lonely, unhinged, effervescent, wise people of every conceivable demographic category. Each new installment brings new questions, new insights, new stories.

I started the Ask a Philosopher booth because I want philosophy to be responsive to the needs of ordinary people. Its important to enable and encourage people to find out about the problems that preoccupy professional philosophers, but its at least as important to enable and encourage philosophers to find out aboutand help withthe problems that preoccupy everyone else.

This book offers an answeror a fragment of an answerto a bunch of the stickiest questions posed by visitors to the booth. The questions reflect the enormous range of what we care about. Sidebars throughout paint the little scenes that help make each booth and each question memorable. Youll occasionally see lines (d), which represent the responses of an imaginary interlocutor. Feel free to read the book in whatever order you want.

Some of the magic of the booth is hard to capture on the pagethe spontaneity, the interactivity, the funky theater of springing philosophy on people who have other things on their minds. But the book captures something. I hope the discussion below gives the sense that theres a way of making philosophy work for each of us, that philosophy can be both perfectly continuous with everyday life and also utterly transporting.

I believe each claim I make in this book. I also believe that the book contains some false claims. The first I believe because Ive written this stuff sincerely, the second because philosophy is hard, and I have something approximating a healthy appreciation for my own limits.

You might see where this is going. These beliefs are inconsistent; they cant all be true. And usually, if I discover that some of my beliefs are inconsistent, Ill revise the beliefs until they no longer are. After all, beliefs are things that you reason with, and reasoning with inconsistent information is a headache. And if some set of beliefs cant all be right, at least one of them has to be wrong. But even if I went back and checked my work, that wouldnt help. I would still be making a bunch of claims, and I would still want to acknowledge that Im sure I blew it somewhere. We have a paradox on our hands.

Luckilymaybe a little too luckilythis is a paradox with a nice, tidy solution. The solution is that theres beliefand theres belief. Or rather, theres full belief, and theres belief by degrees. If I fully believe some inconsistent claims, I have work to do. But if I believe a bunch of things merely to a high degree, I can also believe to a high degree that one of them is wrong.

This all illustrates a few important things.

First, a lot of philosophy arises from poking at the inconsistencies in our own beliefs. Sometimes well be able to reason our way out of them, but sometimes well have to find a way to balance our beliefs between them.

Second, I believe what Ive written in this book, but not 100 percent. When it feels like Im verging on insincerity or overconfidence, it helps to remind myself that Im at least as interested in stimulating fruitful philosophical inquiry as I am in sharing with you the correct answers to some philosophical questions.