This wide-ranging conversation explores whether philosophy is defined by its methods (argument, critique, concept creation), its outcomes (or lack thereof), or the scenes and communities in which it takes place. Along the way, the hosts discuss credentialism in academia, gatekeeping in the discipline, and how philosophy might survive outside the university.

Drawing on thinkers like Graham Priest, Gilles Deleuze, Wittgenstein, Richard Rorty, Kristie Dotson, and Pierre Hadot, the trio refuse to close the question. Instead, they ask: Can philosophy remain meaningful in a world that demands clear outcomes and fixed definitions? Is staying with the question itself the real task?

• Kristie Dotson, How Is This Paper Philosophy? (2012)

• Graham Priest, The Critique of Pure Thought (2006)

• Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? (1994)

• Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life (1995)

• Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (1953)

• Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979)

• Harry Frankfurt, On Bullshit (2005)

Additional Recommended Reading

• Talia Mae Bettcher, Evil Deceivers and Make-Believers: On Transphobic Violence and the Politics of Illusion (2007)

• Talia Mae Bettcher, Trapped in the Wrong Theory: Rethinking Trans Oppression and Resistance (2014)

• Talia Mae Bettcher, Beyond Personhood: An Essay in Trans Philosophy (2024)

• Kristie Dotson, A Cautionary Tale: On Limiting Epistemic Oppression (2015)

• Kristie Dotson, Tracking Epistemic Violence, Tracking Practices of Silencing (2007)

• Elizabeth Spelman, Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought (1988)

• Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Can the Subaltern Speak? (1988)

• Richard Bernstein, The New Constellation: The Ethical-Political Horizons of Modernity/Postmodernity (1991)

• Michel Foucault, What Is Enlightenment? (1984)