The Problem: Focusing Attention

Today almost all of us have a problem with attention: focusing on what we care about or just holding onto basic concentration in the face of repeated distractions. Gloria Mark (UC Irvine, Infomatics) finds that our attention spans have dropped by two-thirds since 2004, with the largest drops occurring circa 2012, right around the widespread adoption of smartphones. The work of the mind we pursue in philosophy cannot be done without sustained attention. College is supposed to be a place where you improve your mind, but there’s a risk that in the hustle of multiple classes, deadlines, work and family responsibilities, you don’t get a chance to cultivate your attention and develop the habits of thought. You will need to reflect deeply on intellectually demanding material to succeed in a career or simply live as a thoughtful, educated citizen.

The (Partial) Solution: Intellectual Exercises and Habits

Cal Newport, author of Deep Work, suggests that:

The cognitive equivalent of aerobic activity is contemplation — the intentional focusing of your mind’s eye on a singular topic, with the goal of increased understanding. Just as the sedentary lifestyles that emerged in the mid-20th century degraded our bodies, our current lack of contemplation is degrading our brains. [“There’s a Good Reason You Can’t Concentrate” NYTimes Op-ed]

We need to intentionally engage in repeated challenging intellectual activities at a time when phones and AI are making it easier to skip the difficult. LLMs are getting better and better at providing users with an apparently thoughtful response for any prompt, but using them will not help you improve your own mind.

Even setting AI aside, however, the struggle with actually doing our own thinking and writing and developing habits of mind remains. Knowing feels great, but learning is hard and painful. What do these contemplative exercises look like? Here’s Cal’s suggestion:

What’s the equivalent of this cardio for our ailing brains? A good candidate is reading. Making sense of written text exercises our minds in important ways. We develop what the cognitive neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf calls “deep reading processes” that rewire and retrain neuronal regions in ways that increase the complexity and nuance of what we’re able to understand. “Deep reading is our species’ bridge to insight and novel thought,” she writes. Perhaps consuming a few dozen book pages a day should become the new 10,000 daily steps — a basic foundation of activity to maintain cognitive fitness. [“There’s a Good Reason You Can’t Concentrate”]

That’s a good place to start: this fall the department will be offering our first 1-credit skills class on advanced reading. We’re not stopping there, though, as we also want to help you develop in two other key areas: active reasoning—carefully formulating arguments—and active writing, putting your thoughts into words. We aim to consistently offer these 1-credit opportunities to students. To enable our community to get an intellectual workout we’re creating intelligence lab spaces in the department. You can use these spaces whether or not you’re doing the official 1-credit class.

The Department’s Contribution: A Gym Space for the Mind

We’re creating the kind of space that Karen Spira, assistant director of the Center for the Advancement of Teaching at Wake Forest University, calls for:

Imagine a space where students could pursue head-on the hard work of learning…human intelligence labs, spaces designed to foster the sustained cognitive engagement that has always distinguished advanced studies. Housed within academic departments, human intelligence labs would be staffed spaces configured to permit the use of technologies that support student learning, while restricting access to those that undermine it. Most critically, these spaces would enable faculty to block access to AI, compelling students to practice the reading, writing and problem-solving skills fundamental to their disciplines. (Inside Higher Ed)

These spaces will be open to all our majors and minors. By the start of the semester, we will have two office spaces in the department available and set up for deep work (at least for a reasonable start, with further refinements to come, based on your feedback). They will be phone and laptop-free spaces. We’re also exploring the possibility of setting up a computer for low-distraction typing, using MATCHA, a tool developed by philosophers to limit the use of AI or other external agents and, instead, focus on showing your our own work and intellectual progress.

How Skills Labs Work

One of the major goals of the philosophy major is to teach students to read closely, write persuasively, and reason well. Cultivating attention is crucial for each of these goals. We build these skills in our classes, but most individual classes have a limited amount of time for repeated practice and reflection on them. These one-credit labs give you dedicated space and time to develop your skills. These skills are important for becoming a reflective human being. They also align closely with many of the attributes employers seek: critical thinking, clear communication, ethical judgment, and complex analysis. The World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025 names analytical thinking the top core skill for employers and the highest priority for skills training through 2027 while problem-solving skills and communication skills (verbal and oral) are three of the top five skills employers look for in entry-level hire according to the 2026 NACE Job Outlook. A 2025 study in the Journal of the American Philosophical Association tracking more than 600,000 undergraduates found that philosophy builds these capacities. Philosophy majors outperform every other major on tests of verbal and logical reasoning and on measures of valuable habits of mind such as curiosity, rigor, and open-mindedness. Philosophy majors score at or near the top of every major graduate admissions test: highest on GRE Verbal, top ranks on the LSAT, GMAT, and MCAT.

Our labs are designed to provide you with more individualized, hands-on learning experiences that sharpen your foundational competencies to set you up for success in your major, minor, or career. The skills labs will involve you learning key techniques to improve your deep skills of reading, writing, or reasoning. You will initially learn about them through asynchronous modules, but you will then practice, apply and develop these skills in the intelligence lab in the department.

To earn the 1 credit for advanced skills, you will need to spend 30 hours engaged in deep work in our thinking lab over the semester. These labs will be a low distraction environment (quiet and no tech). You will be able to apply the reading, writing, or reasoning skills you’re honing on materials you’re working on for classes, as well as completing the skill exercises your professor assigns. Each week during the semester, the department will have 6-10 hours of time slots available and will work with students to coordinate availability. You will check in and out with the supervising department member each time you enter. You should be logging 1-3 hours each week in the intelligence lab to stay on track for completion by the end of the semester. Even if you’re not enrolled at the beginning of the semester, when you discover additional skills development would help, you can sign up for the labs several weeks into the semester.

We think training your mind is the best sort of exercise and self-cultivation and we hope you’ll join us in working out!

The most striking depiction of the divine in Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey is entirely un-Greek. Zendaya’s suffering Athena, slain by the Greeks, is an image that only makes sense in light of the Hebrew and Christian tradition of thinking about the divine. The one case where the divine becomes personal to Odysseus is not through a god showing terrifying power or wondrous feats, but through seeing a human form sharing in suffering and showing the wrongness of inflicting it to Odysseus.

Odyssey translator Emily Wilson completely misreads Christopher Nolan’s film here, insisting that it does not confront the horrors of violence.

Any serious depiction of violence, ancient or modern, must show the perspectives of the victims as well as the perpetrators, and the Homeric poems easily clear the bar – but Nolan doesn’t. The Trojans are dehumanised by their masks; we know none of them by name or face. The hands of Odysseus and Telemachus are bloodied only by the most righteous, computer-game modes of killing, and we feel no pity or horror at the deaths of their victims, whether Trojans, giants, suitors or slaves. During the sack of Troy – which he supposedly organised – Odysseus gazes around in bewilderment and horror, as if he has never seen a massacre before.

Wilson has been misled by the first two depictions of the sack of Troy (maybe she keeps dozing off before Odysseus’ own telling?). It’s true that in the telling of the bard and, especially in Menelaus’s version, we see only masked Trojan defenders, nameless and faceless, who are simply enemies that the heroes we identify with must overcome. But the whole point of that setup is to prepare us to be startled by a reversal. As soon as we switch to Odysseus’ telling, in the film’s third depiction of the sack of Troy, we begin seeing the tragic faces of Trojan victims.

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Emily Wilson has recently doubled down on her criticisms in the Atlantic:

The script grandly insists on the importance of human kindness, while the camera shows us an entirely different set of values…Once the ambush of the Trojans begins, the camera lingers repeatedly not on the human actors but on the enflamed, toppling buildings and the great gates of the city, whose slow-moving mechanism is observed at great length. The script tells us loudly that people matter, but the camera shows us that what matters is the mechanical challenge of moving objects through space.

Again, Wilson focuses on the first telling of the Trojan horse and ignores the fact that Odysseus’ version, the version setting up the climax of the film, shows what his inhuman and impious actions cost him and the Greeks. The faces of the victims are at the center of Odysseus’ experience of the sack of Troy.

As we travel the streets of Troy with Odysseus, we see multiple women and children beheaded or treated horribly before he gets to the temple of Athena. Now Wilson’s obvious point has some merit: what exactly did Odysseus think would happen when Troy was sacked? But in the film’s telling, he might have understood the consequences abstractly but he did not realize their enormity until he saw them and experienced them viscerally. The Trojan Horse is the ancient equivalent of Oppenheimer’s atomic bomb landing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It’s on the temple mount of Athena that he sees the most horrific crime, an innocent young girl’s life being ended. Odysseus sees how dishonoring the barbarism of war is to both divine and human.

Odysseus actually looks away from this awful desecration of human life and towards the desecration of Athena’s statue, which is less painful and can be seen and faced head-on in a way that the beheading of Zendaya’s character cannot, on his telling. Instead of pain just being someone’s lot or a consequence of a necessary social order, the film insists that defacing and destroying humans is defacing and destroying the image of God. This commitment is distinctive to Judaism and Christianity (and then picked up on by liberalism): the equal and measureless moral worth of each human. Such a commitment is utterly alien to the ancient Greek view (and to many corners of the Internet).

The revelation we get in Odysseus’ final telling is that the face he has seen in his mind for 20 years is not the face of his favorite goddess praising his wit and his deeds, but the face of his victim reproaching him for his guile and reminding him of what he’s caused and what that will mean for him and his whole civilization. He and his men were the civilization-destroying sea people all along.

Athena has been radically changed from the bright-eyed war goddess of cunning. Johannes Niedermayer and many other critics see Athena as Odysseus’s “bad conscience,” a “so-called Athena: a frowning, let’s be honest, ugly Athena.” Niedermayer is shockingly wrong about the beauty and pathos of Zendaya’s portrayal, but he is right about the conscience point. Athena is there to guide Odysseus to recognize the wrongness of what he’s done and learn to respect Zeus’s law. We do not see Athena ever appearing to Odysseus before the culmination of the sack of Troy. In the film, the Trojan Horse couldn’t have been an Athena-inspired idea, given that it destroys her temple and her avatar and results in Zendaya making her devastating disappointed face. Athena is there to teach Odysseus the value of humanity.

Emily Wilson might not like this twist, but claiming Nolan ignores what happens to the victims is completely wrong. The fact that Nolan’s storytelling has moved millions of people to watch and rewatch a story about the importance of respecting the stranger and treating others as you would be treated, suggests that his vision of the horrors of war is getting through to people despite’s Wilson deafness. In the film, while Poseidon is present in the storms of the sea and Zeus in his thunder, they are never personally revealed to Odysseus. A direct encounter with the divine comes only through seeing and meditating on a suffering Trojan girl. The film’s Athena shows that the gods are saddened by human suffering and that the gods are revealed in human suffering.

Gods in Human Guise Never Die or Lose Control

But these idea are alien to ancient Greek culture: Greek gods see suffering as the lot of humans (cf. the two jars of Zeus in Iliad 24.653-662) and the idea that they would reveal themselves through and in human suffering is utterly alien. The Homeric gods often take on human form temporarily. But they are never killed or irreversibly physically harmed while human. They assume temporary human guises to assist their favorites, as Athena does in the Odyssey and the full cast of gods does in the Iliad. Sometimes they take on these guises to test humans, as the suitors in Odysseus’ hall are warned:

You ought not to have hit a poor old beggar! If he turns out to be a god from heaven it will end badly! Gods disguise themselves as foreigners and strangers to a town, to see who violates their holy laws and who is good. (The Odyssey, 17.485-7, trans. Wilson)

Gods can act as undercover bosses seeing what people are up to and then rewarding or punishing them. But whether helping their favorites or testing mortals, gods ensure that they are never in danger of actual physical harm.

There are Greek myths where gods in human likeness are restrained, with Dionysus seized by pirates (Homeric Hymn 7.2-10) or bound by Pentheus (Bacchae 434-440). But Dionysus can have these bonds fall away whenever he wants: efforts to physically bind gods in human form can easily be defeated (Homeric Hymn 7.12-14 and Bacchae 447 and 616-7). Gods in human likeness are sometimes threatened with death: Athena as Mentor (Odyssey 22.205–218) or Jupiter when testing Lycaon (Ovid, Metamorphoses 1.211–213, 220–225). They can be insulted or not shown hospitality: Jupiter and Mercury having a thousand doors shut on them in Phrygia (Ovid, Metamorphoses 8.626-9) or Leto insulted and given dirty water when thirsty (Ovid, Metamorphoses 6.313-81). But these threats and insults simply lead to judgment. If humans get close to harming the gods, the gods do not take it. Instead, they reveal themselves and seek vengeance.1

We see this clearly in the closest parallel to Nolan’s depiction of Athena and her priestess, a story of Demeter taking on the form of her priestess. In this myth, a man named Erysichthon decides to cut down a grove sacred to Demeter to build up his banqueting hall. He and his twenty servants start hacking down trees:

Demeter sensed that her sacred wood was in pain, and she spoke in anger, “Who is cutting down my lovely trees?”At once she assumed the form of Nicippe, whom the city had appointed her public priestess. She had in her hand the garlands and poppy, and the key to the shrine hung on her shoulder. She spoke soothingly to the wicked and shameless man: “Child, you who cut the trees dedicated to the gods, child, stop, child much-prayed for by your parents, cease and turn back your servants, so Queen Demeter will not be angry—you are pillaging something sacred to her.” But he looked at her more fiercely than a lioness looks at a hunter in the Tmarian mountains, a lioness who has just given birth, whose eyes they say are grimmest. “Back off,” he said, “or I will fix this great ax in your flesh. These will put a roof on my house, where I plan to lay out for my comrades their fill of hearty banquets.” So the boy spoke and Nemesis recorded his evil speech.

Demeter was unspeakably angry and became visible as a goddess. Her steps touched the ground but her head reached Olympus. When they saw the goddess, they ran off at once half-dead from fear, leaving the bronze ax-heads in the oaks. She left the others alone, for they followed by necessity under the hand of their master. But she answered their overbearing lord, “Yes, yes, build yourself a house, you dog—dog!—where you will hold your banquets. Constant feasts will be yours in time to come.” That much she said, and devised trouble for Erysichthon. At once she afflicted him with a harsh and savage hunger, burning fiercely, and he was consumed by a terrible disease. Poor man, as much as he ate, he wanted so much again. (Callimachus, Hymn VI to Demeter, 42-68, ed. and trans. Dee L. Clayman)

When in a frail human likeness, the gods are still in control. Even when Demeter becomes a priestess facing a large group of armed men, she is not in danger. She is giving them a last chance to change their mind before they are punished. When Erysichthon fails to listen, Demeter shows herself as a god. She would never become a human who will actually be killed.

The Divine Revealed Through Suffering: A Hebrew and Christian Idea

The idea that the divine cares about human suffering and is revealed through suffering comes from the Hebrew and Christian traditions. The Jewish prophets insist that God cares for the poor and the victims of injustice over the strong and the rulers. The Fourth Servant Song of Isaiah 52-3 depicts a suffering servant who is a manifestation of God and experiences suffering and humiliation, physical and mental, that somehow heals God’s people.2 Suffering becomes something that the servants of God take on in order to overcome. The Christian gospels go even further, insisting that God reveals himself by becoming incarnate in a human who is not a king or powerful leader, but a subject. On the cross, Jesus undergoes the worst of torments that humans face, then dies. A God who suffers and dies was so disturbing and hard to conceive for a Greco-Roman audience that many Christian-influenced groups such as the Gnostics insisted that Jesus only appeared human and/or that the crucifixion did not happen or was carried out on a mere image, not the actual divine messenger. Divine suffering was completely shocking and out of bounds to the Greeks and Romans.

It was also something that Christians only gradually became comfortable with. Today when you think of Christian depictions of God you might think of Michelangelo’s Pieta or medieval altarpieces depicting Jesus’ crucifixion.

But early Christians in the Roman Catacombs simply depict Jesus as the Good Shepherd, a beardless young man carrying a lamb.

The works in the catacombs and early Christian churches consistently use this good shepherd depiction together with allusive imagery such as the fish, anchor, and Jonah and the whale (a reference to the resurrection), but they never depict Jesus suffering or on a cross. In fact, one of the earliest visual depictions of Jesus on a cross that we have is a piece of graffiti from around the year 200 of the Christian era depicting a crucified figure with the head of a donkey: “Alexamenos worshipping his god”

One of our only visuals of the cross in the first three centuries of Christian presence is drawn by someone mocking Christians for absurdly associating the divine with shameful suffering.

The earliest extant Christian devotional art depicting the crucifixion dates to 430, the wooden doors of Santa Sabina.3 This image appears over a century after Constantine both legalizes Christianity and ends crucifixion as a punishment in the Roman empire. Only once no one in living memory knew people who had experienced crucifixion do we see this image incorporated into the structure of a Christian church. With an increased emphasis in Christian theology on Jesus as suffering man as well as triumphant God, Christian artists dare to portray Jesus on the cross. The upper left panel of these doors shows Christ crucified between the two thieves.

This depiction of a suffering god is revolutionary, but even here, Jesus’s eyes are open and he and the thieves are in a contemplative praying position, not in naturalistic agony. It will take centuries more for Christians to depict Jesus’s wounds and bodily suffering more directly. Over time, meditation on and depiction of his sufferings grow more vivid and naturalistic until this treatment predominates and shapes views of the divine. Christians and those influenced by them come to understand the divine as revealed through suffering and to see God as someone who cares about suffering.

This Christian view will become the target of Nietzsche’s critique of slave morality, what Nietzsche calls an inversion of values on which weakness is strength and the poor and humble are lifted up. This revolution took time: even in the first centuries of the Christian era, such a visual inversion was undepictable. It took years of theological and artistic effort to open up such a view.

The idea that the divine cares about and is seen through one who suffers is profoundly Christian and profoundly un-Greek. Here critics of Nolan’s authenticity have a point. Even if Nolan himself denies it, his film shows how much visual art still relies on the Christian moral imagination and Christian imagery.

Christopher Nolan’s version of The Odyssey centers on “Zeus’s law,” a phrase uttered more often in the film than in any Greek text. This is Nolan’s paraphrase of xenia, the obligation of guest hospitality, guaranteed and defended by Ζεὺς Ξείνιος (Zeus of Hospitality or the Stranger). In the film, this obligation to act respectfully as a host or a guest is quickly reformulated by Penelope as the much broader “treat others as you would be treated.” This formulation of Zeus’s law then becomes the defining moral center of the film. For Nolan, this extension makes sense because he sees xenia as simply the archaic Greek manifestation of the Golden Rule:

once you ignore the theological underpinning of xenia, what you realize is that it is what we in modern terms call the golden rule. You know, this idea of treat others as you would be treated has never really changed over time. The reasons that we try to hold people to that might have changed, but the idea itself hasn’t changed.

Here Nolan is just wrong. In archaic Greek society, you need to treat people according to their roles. The Golden Rule is false because it implies treating everyone as your equal. As a warrior, you should treat warriors with the respect due to them but you can treat slaves with contempt. The wives of other warriors need to be respected but slave girls are open for your use, as long as you don’t run off with them or treat them in ways that would bring shame to their owners. The societies depicted in Homer do not see people as equal or as all having inherent dignity: the warrior does not have to treat a slave the way the slave wants to be treated, because they are not the same.

Xenia is a specific type of hospitality that only people in the right role i.e. elite heads of household can offer (the majority of humans are excluded) and need not be extended in all circumstances. The idea that beggars might sometimes be gods in disguise is appealed to because otherwise beggars would have no moral/social value worth respecting. The association with Zeus gives the beggar enough status to be deserving of a few scraps, but that’s all. Xenia is also never presented as the basis for all human interactions. For the archaic Greeks, each relationship has its own norms. These norms often conflict, which is why Orestes can be both honoring the gods by avenging his father Agamemnon’s death and dishonoring them by killing his own mother, Clytemnestra.

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But Reexamining Values through Homeric Stories is Classically Greek

So if we ask whether the moral universe and values of Nolan’s Odyssey match Homer, the answer is obviously no. As Emily Wilson insists:

Deception, warmongering, extramarital sex, cruelty to animals, abusing women and yearning for honour – all perfectly fine in the world of Homer – are, in this version, very bad.

But a similar mismatch was already present in the 5th century BC classical Greek adaptations of Homeric stories. Emily Wilson ignores the many ways that classical Greeks were already using Homer to think through the problems with “abusing women and yearning for honour” in works such as Aeschylus’s Agammemnon or Euripides’ The Trojan Women. Nolan’s film belongs in the same storytelling category, later works drawing on Homer but seeking more universal values and reinterpreting the story to draw out lessons for the artist’s time.

As Nolan says,

what the poem to me is saying, or inspiring me, is the idea of civilization depends on this [Golden] rule, and possibly is even defined by it. And that to me was a really interesting thing, to realize this ancient text to me speaks directly to the modern world, because I think we live in a world where the concept of xenia, the concept of mutual respect, is more challenged, I think, than it’s ever been, in a more obvious way than it’s ever been. And I think we see the negative effects of that in terms of what defines civilization, what binds us together.

Wilson refuses to extend Nolan the latitude for such reinterpretation because his “film’s own values and vision don’t hang together” but she is just wrong about this. Nolan takes a characteristic claim about the Trojan war and xenia—that Troy fell because one leader (Paris) broke xenia in seizing the wife of a man he was the guest of— and reverses it.1 On his telling, the whole of Greek civilization falls because one Greek leader (Odysseus) broke xenia in employing the Trojan horse. Nolan is doing some serious retconning of Odysseus’s character and reinterpreting Homeric morality, but in much the same way as the classical Athenian poets.

Euripides’s Cyclops uses an episode from the Odyssey to show a similar conflict between law and self-interested cunning. In this satyr play, after Odysseus appeals to the law of hospitality, the Cyclops replies that

I’m not afraid of Zeus’s thunder; in fact, I don’t believe Zeus is stronger than I am. And anyway I don’t care…as for sacrifices, I make mine, not to the gods, but the greatest god of all, this belly of mine! To eat, to drink from day to day, to have no worries—that’s the real Zeus for your clever man! As for those who embroider human life with their little laws—damn the lot of them! (Euripides, Cyclops 320-322, 334-340, trans. Arrowsmith)

Here, as in Nolan’s Odyssey, the fundamental conflict is not between Greeks and Trojans or men and monsters, but between those who uphold moral laws binding across places and peoples and those who do whatever fills their belly. We see the destruction wrought by those who deny the importance of laws. Like Euripides, Nolan wants to show the consequences for society of adopting the position of pure self-interest.

In Euripides’ play, Odysseus calls on Zeus in response to the Cyclops. Zeus must see and avenge the violation of the laws of hospitality or he is no god:

O Zeus, god of strangers, look down on from where you sit, throned among the bright stars! If you do not look down upon me now, you are no Zeus, but a nothing at all. (Cyclops 353-355, trans. Arrowsmith)

If the divine beings do not bring about consequences for the breaking of moral laws they risk their status as gods. Questioning the gods and whether Zeus will guarantee the moral order may not be prominent in Homer’s Odyssey but it becomes a preoccupation of classical Athens.

Nolan’s film is part of this interpretive lineage, a questioning that took place over four centuries before the Christian era. Will the Cyclops “a man who cares for neither man nor god” (604) be punished for what he does? In the play, neither the Cyclops nor Euripides’ version of Odysseus turn out to be committed to following a universal moral order, but Euripides still dramatizes the question of whether humans can get away with ignoring law and defying the gods, focusing his audience on the same issues as Nolan’s Odyssey.2

The Golden Rule: Not Exclusively Christian and a Decent Candidate for the Basis of Morality and Civilizational Order

Critics of Nolan who claim he’s Christianizing the Odyssey also go too far in claiming that reciprocal ethical treatment is an exclusively Christian idea. While Nolan is wrong to find the Golden Rule in archaic Greece, he’s actually joining a number of philosophers and theologians in noting that versions of the Golden Rule do show up in different cultures, seemingly independently. John Hick, for example, has argued that this Golden Rule is the common core of morality taught by major religions including Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.3 Immanuel Kant bases his whole ethics on the categorical imperative, which closely resembles the Golden Rule—though, like the great scholarly pedant that he was, Kant has a lengthy footnote explaining why his formulation is better than Jesus’s.4 While the universality and status of the Golden Rule is certainly still up for debate, Nolan’s claim that it’s a strong candidate for the basis of morality and civilizational order is defensible.

Even John Hick, though, doesn’t include ancient Greek gods among the religions in which he detects the presence of the Golden Rule and a universal moral code. There’s an undeniable awkwardness about trying to turn a ritual respect for strangers into a universal moral code, as the film shows. There’s a reason none of the classical Greek philosophical schools attempt to found morality on xenia, it’s just not that promising a foundation. When the Stoics do bring in Zeus to explain the order and laws of the universe, it’s Zeus as world-governing reason, distinct from the particular customs and roles of particular societies, not Zeus in the limited epithet of protecting strangers.

The Gods Exist (But Not Like That): The Odyssey’s Naturalistic Theology

This universal natural order is, however, close to the film’s conception of the divine. Odysseus wrongly defies the gods in the first part of his journey largely because he does not yet understand the way the gods are integrated into the natural and moral order. Emily Wilson has complaints about the gods:

the film wants to have it both ways. There are no gods, and yet shipwrecks and death are presented as the inevitable consequence of blinding the son of Poseidon and devouring the Cattle of the Sun. Zeus’ law is portrayed as being crucially important, and yet there is no Zeus. Nolan’s vision of the world is not quite big enough to include either real gods or real people who might be different from us.

What is a real god? Would Wilson deny that the Stoics affirm the gods because they conceive of Zeus as the Reason that causes all things as an immanent principle within them, not as a human-shaped entity hurling lightning? For the Stoics, Zeus operates through ordering natural causes: they reject a natural/supernatural distinction and this film does as well. Wilson assumes that the only way in which the gods would be real would be as beings with bodies made of ichor, dwelling on Mount Olympus.

That is one conception of the gods, but it was not the only one in the Greco-Roman world. From the classical age on, the Greeks are debating how to conceive of the gods and whether depicting them as like human persons is reasonable, helpful but only when interpreted allegorically, or entirely misleading. The gods are present in this film, but in and through their effects. We need to pay attention to all the sounds and sights. Wilson is apparently either unable to hear thunder in a movie theater or unaware of its association with Zeus.

In the film’s telling, Calypso only starts guiding Odysseus through his memories at the urging of the thunder of Zeus, which causes her to withdraw the lotus and help Odysseus work through his feelings and memories. The sounds of Zeus’ thunder recurs again and again at key moments to signal the way that the gods are shaping the world.

Now this is something that Odysseus himself has to learn along with the audience. Early on in his voyages, Odysseus refers to “your gods” when talking to Eurylochus, suggesting a certain kind of skepticism. Odysseus doesn’t have the same relationship to the gods as the other men. He explicitly insists that the gods help those who help themselves. Odysseus is skeptical of special divine action, but also hadn’t fully realized the way that the gods are connected to the natural and moral order.

That’s something he comes to appreciate through his encounters with Circe, Sinon, and Calypso. Circe shows him that Zeus’s law is even more expansive than he thought: not only are you responsible for your own actions as a host and guest, you’re also responsible for everyone in your party. Odysseus has to consider what his men are capable of. When Sinon reproaches him for not honoring the men he left behind, Odysseus commits himself to the pious ritual of sacrificing for the fallen, something we have never seen him do previously. On leaving Troy, Odysseus just said “let’s go home,” without any sacrifice or invocation of the gods.

At this point, though, Odysseus still tries to resist the will of the gods by guiding his men through the perils of Scylla and Charybdis and the tasty sun cattle, or at least making them responsible for their own fate. When this defiance fails and Odysseus alone is left alive, he learns from Calypso and Athena that he shouldn’t take all the responsibility on himself. Just as his men’s actions are a response to his framing of their choices, so his own actions are a response to the gods’ framing of reality. As Athena explains, the gods are responsible for everything, for the whole natural order: the gods’ judgment manifests in the storms, wind, and rain. The gods aren’t in a separate supernatural realm that sometimes intersects with the natural: instead, there’s one realm that’s both natural and divine. Odysseus needs to accept the order of nature and the will of the gods, as he does by leaving the island on a tiny raft made from the washed-up wood of his ship.

The claim that we see the gods not through human or personal manifestations, but through the way they control thunder and storms and the way they ensure consequences to human action, good or bad, would be entirely legible to an ancient Greek audience. The movie shows Odysseus learning the cost of defying the gods and the importance of respecting the divine order, Zeus’ law.

Some critics think the status of the divine in the film is a matter of personal interpretation: “It’s possible Zeus sent the storm that tore their ship apart, but it’s just as likely they ran into bad weather by chance. Even if Nolan never expressly says there are no gods in his Odyssey, he presents a version of the story in which their existence comes down to personal faith.” I have some questions about how they form their beliefs.

You’re told that killing the sun god’s cattle will mean death. All the crew except for one man eat the cattle. That man turns out to be the only survivor of a devastating shipwreck. You’re told to trust the gods and put yourself on a raft with no sail, oar, food, or water. You do this and then you wake up on the shores of your home. I don’t know about all these skeptical reviewers, but I’d update my beliefs pretty hard in the direction of divine order, especially when I hear thunder every time there’s a significant morally good or bad choice. Too many critics didn’t listen to Athena.

The film focuses on how the gods enable Odysseus when he acts in accordance with nature, instead of highlighting special divine actions. Odysseus’s safety and moral standing do not depend on his faith in the gods, in the way that a Christian believer’s salvation depends Christ’s saving action, but on his own actions using the wisdom he has learnt. The gods bring Odysseus back to Ithaca but it is Odysseus who needs to destroy the suitors (with the gods’ approval). Then Odysseus accepts his punishment and goes into exile to do his part to restore the social order needed for civilization, even though he knows this order has been upset irrevocably.

On the theology of this movie, humans are the agents, but they need to accept the moral and natural law in order to act well. The film is, in this sense, much more Stoic than Christian. In a world where a supposed defender of Christianity like Matt Walsh is joining forces with Emily Wilson to say that the truly Christian thing would have been to show all these suitors and the maidservants being dismembered, I’ll take someone like Nolan, who is willing to say that people should not murder each other and should respect the golden rule.

As we’ll see in my next post, though, Nolan’s biggest twist relies on an image which is not just an updating and rereading of Homeric and Greek materials, but goes in an entirely alien (and Christian) direction.

Other classicists such as Emily Wilson have noted that the film’s Odysseus has lost his scheming edge and complicated character, but it’s worth picking up on how specifically Roman Matt Damon’s Odysseus is.

Derek Thompson

What Is Lost When We Make 'The Odyssey' Modern

The Odyssey is everywhere right now. Christopher Nolan’s film is conquering the box office, spawning online memes, and dominating online discourse. If you rip your eyes away from your feeds, and turn your attention to another book or film, you might find Homer’s epic dwelling there, too. As the author and translator Daniel Mendelsohn has observed, the s…

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a month ago · 265 likes · 2 comments · Derek Thompson

We see the Roman character of Nolan’s hero in one of the most famous episodes, Odysseus’ encounter with the cyclops. In Homer’s The Odyssey, Odysseus outwits the cyclops Polyphemus verbally as well as physically, introducing himself as “No Man,” so that the cyclops’ descriptions of who is harming him sound confusing and unbelievable to his fellow cyclops listening from their islands. But before Odysseus voyages off, he needs to claim the glory of having bested Polyphemus in word and deed. Odysseus reveals his name and lineage so that Polyphemus knows who defeated him. But this gives Polyphemus just the information he needs to call on his father Poseidon for revenge.

In Nolan’s film, by contrast, Odysseus does not taunt Polyphemus or, indeed, say anything to him at all. Odysseus’s troubles with Poseidon are caused by what he has to do to escape the cyclops and to defend his men, not by his individual desire for recognition. It is Odysseus seeing the helmet of one of his lost men tumble out of the cave that enrages him and causes him to shoot an arrow at the cyclops. The final conflict with Polyphemus comes because Odysseus cares too much, not because of his excessive desire for glory.

Matt Damon’s Odysseus is a leader of men who wants to see them come home, more like the Tom Hanks of Saving Private Ryan than an amoral Greek trickster. His virtues are a pious respect for family, a concern for order, and a determination to keep his word. He is a man of honor who wants even animals to have a fair fight in a hunt, giving them a chance with the strum of his bow. In the film, Odysseus comes up with the stratagem of the wooden horse, but quickly regrets it, as he sees the destruction it unleashes on the norms of hospitality and the loss of civilized order. Odysseus displays no such regret anywhere in Homer’s verses.

Nolan’s Odysseus is the stolid Aeneas of Virgil, not the Odysseus who loves sneaking about, lying, and doing whatever he needs to get out of a jam. He spends years with Calypso as a means to forget about his trauma, not because he enjoys having sex with a beautiful goddess. Even Athena is reduced to the role of a therapist, instead of a bright-eyed warrior who delights in Odysseus’ wits and scheming. Indeed, Damon’s Odysseus is a war-weary veteran of few words, rarely stringing a whole paragraph together. You can’t imagine an audience hanging on his stories for hours, as they do in Homer’s poem.

Nolan’s Odysseus is at his most Roman in the climax: the murder of the suitors and its aftermath. Homer’s Odyssey centers on Odysseus’ need to restore his reputation and his unchallenged supremacy in his household and on Ithaka. In book 20, Odysseus, sleeping as a beggar in his own hall, is enraged when he hears his female slaves slipping out to sleep with the suitors. His spirit (thumos) boils up with the urge to slaughter them on the spot, but he forces himself to hold back:

“And striking his chest he rebuked his heart with these words: ‘Endure now, heart; you once endured another thing even more shameless than this.’” (20, 17-18)

Socrates, in Plato’s Republic (4.441b), cites these lines as his canonical example of the reasoning part (to logistikon) holding back the spirited part of the soul. Odysseus manages to hold back from killing the suitors and his servants because that doesn’t fit with his plan. His restraint is not due to mercy or a concern with order, but only because the time is not right. Once his plan is set up not only does he kill every suitor, he murders every single one of the raped women because they dishonored him.1 The worst violence is reserved for disloyal members of his own household because they have undermined Odysseus’ status the most. In the midst of the fight with the suitors, Odysseus instructs the loyal swine-herd Eumaeus to tie the disloyal goat-herd Melanthius to the roof-beams in order to leave him restrained but alive, so that he can be tortured at length later (22, 170-200), a task carried out with gruesome relish. This is Homer’s Odysseus: wily, more flexible in the means of maintaining his honor and accomplishing great deeds than Achilles or Ajax, but just as concerned with honor and just as ruthless.

The film not only cuts out the killing of Odysseus’s women slaves (understandably), it reconfigures Odysseus’s encounter with the suitors. While Odysseus does kill many of them, many others kneel and are brought back into the political order of Ithaca. In the aftermath of the destruction, Odysseus then exiles himself to restore the norms of hospitality and promote the success of his son’s leadership. These are all Roman values: incorporating defeated enemies back into your polity, thinking carefully about succession, putting stability above individual glory. They are not the values of Homer’s hero.

Some ancient literary scholars thought that Homer’s Odyssey was meant to end with his reunion with Penelope after the slaughter.2 Even if we keep book 24, though, where Odysseus faces the wrath of the slaughtered suitors’ families, we do not see him seeking peace and order. In the book 24 version, Athena steps in to restrain Odysseus from killing before the blood feud gets out of hand, forcing a truce between him and the suitors’ families. Without that book, we would simply have Odysseus smiting all his enemies, reclaiming his wife, and returning to his throne. In neither version is Odysseus an agent who bring order and subdues the subjected. Odysseus shows minimal concern for the civilizational implications of his actions.

My point isn’t to critique Nolan’s accomplishment. I enjoyed the film! In many other respects it’s an astonishingly faithful adaptation. Nolan tracks The Odyssey’s complex structure of interweaving stories: Telemachus’ search for his father, Odysseus’ adventures and the recounting of them through memories and stories, converging on the homecoming to Ithaca. But it’s worth considering Nolan’s transformations to see how he has changed the story’s character. The wily, sharp-tongued Odysseus is not a character Christopher Nolan would write well and the rough and simple world of cattle raids on Homeric Ithaka might would not look epic enough on screen. Nolan keeps the parts of The Odyssey that support his vision: Argos waiting for his master, a son longing for his father’s affirmation, a wife waiting for the return of the king. He alters or drops the elements that don’t fit: I would have loved to have seen Nolan’s version of the telepathically piloted ships of the Phaeacians, but that would have made the story more magical and scifi than Nolan’s version focusing on the collapse of civilization.

I waited to read Dhananjay Jagannathan’s interpretation until after I had written my own, but I agree with him that Nolan has tilted the balance of the story towards the political and away from the domestic.

the world that reverence is meant to protect in the film is the world of commerce, the world of civilization and political projects, in other words, the world of ambition.

Cultured Opinion

we must give blood to the ghosts

I love old things. The first part of my scholarly career and my student years before that have largely been spent with ancient Greek texts. On my off days I sing Renaissance music. Most of my furniture and a good deal of my clothing is vintage. No doubt some of my antiquarian tastes arise from a desire to rebel against a world and a dominant culture I f…

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a month ago · 13 likes · 3 comments · Dhananjay Jagannathan

The Odyssey is an amazing film and an amazing adaptation. But it takes place in a different moral universe than Homer. Homer’s Odysseus is concerned with the glory of his name and the impressiveness of his deeds. Nolan’s Odysseus, like Virgil’s Aeneas, is driven by the struggle to impose order on a barbarian people who need to be taught to appreciate the arts of civilization. Worried about the effects of his choices on future generations, he realizes that his goal must be “to impose the custom of peace, to spare the subjected, and to beat down the proud.”3

Unfortunately, Nolan’s Odysseus is unable to establish the proper structures for justice in a world where the sons of the House of Atreus care only for themselves and Odysseus’ men care too much for their own skins and not enough for justice and order.

“should hear the opinions of adversaries…from persons who actually believe them.”

But this requires disclosing our opinions in the classroom, something that Hollis Robbins finds problematic.

Hollis Robbins on Privacy in the Classroom

Robbins’ case that authenticity and embodiment doesn’t matter is based around the value of privacy:

Anecdotal Value

What AI changes about 'Viewpoint Diversity'

While the grownups are fighting, students are off widening the Overton chat window on their large language models (LLMs) in the privacy of their dorm rooms. The viewpoint diversity available to students is perhaps only tangentially related to how their professors vote and whether they have tenure…

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4 months ago · 26 likes · 11 comments · Hollis Robbins

Now I’ve never shared with anything about how I vote in class. I agree with Hollis that, in almost all cases, that sort of information is a distraction from teaching and often makes a classroom less open to honest disagreement. I focus my classes on the texts we’re considering. If students want to know my personal views, I tell them they can come by my office hours and talk. I also agree with Hollis that the classroom should be a place where students explore and test positions they don’t actually hold. In most contexts, students should not be forced to reveal all of their beliefs publicly. But Hollis is wrong that the authenticity of beliefs is irrelevant to the value of viewpoint diversity. True exploration of the good life requires that professors and students are willing to share what they actually believe.

Authenticity and the Goal of Inquiry: Harmony between My Beliefs and Actions

That’s my case for thinking that there is an important aspect of viewpoint diversity that requires talking with someone who thinks differently. John Stuart Mill is right to think that engaging with other people and communities who personally hold the views you oppose matters. Then there is the question of authenticity and whether classes should involve professors and student sharing what they actually think.

Hollis Robbins claims that:

Again, the fact that summaries of different viewpoints are available outside of class (whether from AI or other sources) does not change the value of examining them together in class. Here I may simply disagree with Hollis on what the goals of education are. In my view, the goal of examining our beliefs is to attain harmony between what we believe and how we live, between thought and action. Along the way, we may often want to examine and try on views we don’t fully subscribe to, but we should never be completely cut off from our genuine convictions.

This insistence on authentic self-examination goes back to Socrates, not just the model of a philosopher, but also arguably one of the founders of liberal education. In Plato’s account of his defense, Socrates claims that:

This is the foundation for Socrates’ famous claim that the unexamined life is not worth living for humans (Apology, 38a). For our testing to be meaningful, we need to be talking about views of the good that we actually care about and are considering living by, not just hypothetical thoughts we would never act on and do not take seriously. Many of our discussions will be exploratory, but they ultimately need to connect to the beliefs we live by.

I explore ethical questions with my students so that they can live well and form their own beliefs and actions well, not just be aware of a multiplicity of possibilities. Hollis insists that not sharing in class can be a kind of negative participation. I’m open to including silence as a type of speech, but given the goals of liberal education, privacy about conceptions of the good isn’t ultimately compatible with communities of education worthy of the name. Exploring the good life unavoidably requires both the space to share and discuss what we actually think and exposure to genuinely alternative ways of living and thinking. Otherwise we’re just encouraging ourselves and our students to be sophists and align ourselves with whatever we think the prevailing opinions are or what we’ll be rewarded for saying. This is not the kind of transferrable skill we should be encouraging.

Intellectual Life and Living Traditions

Students are also looking for teachers who can guide them. Not every professor needs to do this, but there is a genuine responsibility for professors to be available as a mentor for those students who seek it. Scholars also represent and continue traditions. When I teach medieval philosophy, I do my best to articulate what Moses Maimonides and Ibn Sina think about human and divine nature, and I’ve put in the work to make sure my teaching on them is accurate. However, I don’t have the same sense of how their thought can be extended and defended today as a Jewish or Muslim scholar with the same scholarly background as myself but also a living connection to those traditions. I do my best to meet my Muslim and Jewish students where they’re at but I can’t guide them in the same way.

Now that’s no reason for me not to teach these thinkers. I agree with some of the other contributors to the Viewpoint Diversity volume, Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Richard North Patterson, that intellectual engagement involves taking on other perspectives and that authors and teachers outside of a tradition or identity can still represent and engage with that tradition or identity. As Gates Jr. puts it:

I agree with Gates Jr.’s view and I think professors should be encouraged to teach views outside of their own traditions, identities, or subjects. That commitment might seem to be in tension with my emphasis on scholars as mentors and representatives of intellectual traditions, but it isn’t. Attentive and motivated engagement with a subject will be more rewarding and more successful when it can engage not just with an abstract view, but with people and communities who live by and continue to defend that view. An impressive AI willing to spin out arguments for the view as a theoretical possibility is, once again, not adequate substitute. This is a point not just about religious or political beliefs or traditions but about all kinds of views of the good life. When I teach the Stoics, Plotinus, Baruch Spinoza, or Immanuel Kant, I value being able to point my students to people and communities who are committed to living out their thought and defending developments of it in the present. As Hollis herself has suggested in interviews, the kind of education that is likely to persist and continue to have value is based on a genuine relationship between professor and student, not on accurate summaries of the possibility space of views.

Which Classes Require Authenticity?

Now some classes are just about attaining mastery of a certain skill, whether that’s brewing beer, calculating differential equations, measuring vital signs, or practicing double-entry bookkeeping. In those contexts, privacy of beliefs is reasonable. I don’t need to share my beliefs about the philosophy of food, mathematics, health, or accounting, much less about politics or religion, to show I’ve mastered the relevant skills. I also do not need to learn that much about my instructors’ views on ultimate reality for them to successfully teach me how to do these things. But classes about the good life are different. To be genuine dialogue, as opposed to showing off or empty talk, they need to be connected to what I and my students actually value and pursue.

Professors need to be sensitive here. I agree with Hollis that there are gray areas in discussion. Practical wisdom for the teacher requires both knowing yourself and your students. Professors should carefully consider when and how to push for disclosure and when to emphasize exploration and taking on different perspectives. I’m still working to find that balance in my own teaching. For in-class discussions, I generally prefer to leave it up to students how much they wish to disclose, but I make sure that they are pushed to share their own views in ways that are not subject to public scrutiny. In my philosophy classes, I usually ask my students to complete an initial reflection on their views on the topics we’ll consider before our first class. Then at the end of the semester I ask them to complete answers to the same questions, before seeing their initial answers, and allowing them to reflect on how their thought has developed. This reflection is for their own benefit. It’s not performative or shared with the whole class and it’s graded for completion, not on whether it matches my own views. I don’t ask my students to publicly share all their deepest beliefs, but I do ask them to honestly reflect. If you don’t reflect on what you actually think, your thoughts and feelings will end up coming from someone else, whether your surrounding culture or an AI.

Hollis, unlike most of her follow contributors to Viewpoint Diversity: What It Is, Why We Need It, and How to Get It (co-edited by John Tomasi and Bernard Schweizer), disagrees sharply with John Stuart Mill on the question of whether the search for truth requires exposure to people who actually think differently. Mill claims:

Hollis Robbins insists that the situation is different in the age of AI. The widespread availability of sufficiently accurate representations via AI means that:

Anecdotal Value

What AI changes about 'Viewpoint Diversity'

While the grownups are fighting, students are off widening the Overton chat window on their large language models (LLMs) in the privacy of their dorm rooms. The viewpoint diversity available to students is perhaps only tangentially related to how their professors vote and whether they have tenure…

Read more

4 months ago · 23 likes · 9 comments · Hollis Robbins

Now, unlike many humanities folks, I’m open to the possibility that AI models might be able to represent complex views to students as accurately as professors, even philosophy professors. But Robbins is wrong to think that authenticity doesn’t matter and that there’s no distinctive value in encountering views embodied in a person or community. The intellectual life suffers when only a very limited range of alternatives for what to believe and how to live are represented in university communities. Accurate, abstract representations of various intellectual possibilities by AI do not substitute for a face-to-face encounter with someone who actually holds them.

My personal experience as a Protestant undergraduate at Thomas Aquinas College, a very Catholic Great Books college taught me the difference between presenting a bunch of different views (which our classes certainly did) and genuinely offering multiple models of the intellectual life (which the college did not). To properly appreciate different ways of viewing the world and pursuing the good we need to encounter other people who defend and live them out. Exposure to many different perspectives does not guarantee genuine intellectual diversity.

Lots of Views, But Only One Viewpoint: My Undergrad College Experience

My undergrad education at Thomas Aquinas College, a small Catholic Great Books college, featured many viewpoints but a single rigid model of intellectual life. On the one hand, we carefully examined an impressive array of thinkers from Machiavelli and Nietzsche to Kant and Darwin. We read the whole of Plato’s Symposium, even the gender ideology parts that Texas forbids from General Studies classes. I read more Karl Marx than 99% of avowed Marxists (not just the Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital, but the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 and the German Ideology). And the tutors guiding our discussions ensured that we took all of these views seriously. Students actually did the readings and our discussions were focused on what the texts said and the arguments they made, not how we felt about them or whether we liked their views. In that sense, I was successfully exposed to a huge range of diverse perspectives.

In another sense, the intellectual life of the college was extremely narrow. Thomas Aquinas College earns its name: it offers an entire education set up to make its students disciples of St. Thomas. Tutors at the college must swear an oath of fidelity to the Magisterium of the Catholic church and convince the Instruction Committee of their devotion to the thought of Thomas Aquinas. While much of the curriculum overlaps with St. John’s College, a secular Great Books program, the college teaches Latin instead of ancient Greek so that students are prepared to read Thomas Aquinas in the original. Job candidates are often turned down and multiple tutors have been fired because, even though they were committed Thomists, they were not the right kind of Thomist (Laval Thomism is the true doctrine).1

In many ways, I received an amazing education. My time there prepared me well to read and publish on Aristotle, Augustine, and Thomas Aquinas. It also prepared me to be in the intellectual minority, something that would serve me well in grad school and my future time in institutions of higher education. Although not a Catholic, I valued the theology and philosophy we studied and I knew of the college’s commitment going in (though it wasn’t until actually living there that I realized how encompassing and sometimes stifling this vision ended up being).

I still engaged with a wide array of thinkers, but I wished there were more types of intellectual mentor available to me and that I’d been part of actual debate between living traditions, instead of only having access to a conservative Catholic Laval Thomist vision of the intellectual life. But my issues with narrowness would not have been addressed by AI. If I’d been able to use an advanced LLM, it might have allowed me to refine my understanding of certain challenging thinkers that most of the tutors were not well acquainted with, like Hegel or Husserl, but it wouldn’t have significantly changed my intellectual experience. The most exciting talk during my four years was not any of the many Catholic speakers who came and applied versions of the same familiar intellectual framework to various topics but the time Hans-Hermann Hoppe, a hardcore libertarian, was invited to give a lecture and the Q+A turned into a heated fight between an anarchocapitalist who insisted that taxation is theft and that private security teams should replace the state and a bunch of undergrads trying to defend the legitimacy of taxation and political authority.

There weren’t enough moments like these, sadly. Too many senior theses followed the classic formula of picking an issue, citing a few Great Books on the topic, and then identifying the 2-3 passages from Thomas Aquinas that provided the true perspective on the matter. Now in my judgment, Aquinas is a truly impressive thinker, but he’s not decisive on every issue.2 The thought of my tutors and fellow classmates would also have been sharpened by more exposure to thinkers with genuinely different commitments. Again, however, reading a few AI summaries of rival Thomisms or other schools of philosophy would not fundamentally change the situation.

Thomas Aquinas College had and continues to have a serious intellectual life based around its founding commitments. Many colleges have no intellectual culture or commitments at all, just a heap of classes without any unifying vision. I’m glad I was educated in a place that challenged me and offered a model of the intellectual life to which I could respond. I also appreciate that TAC is explicit about its intellectual commitments and founding philosophy. Many colleges and departments have, in practice, a specific and limited view of what’s true or worth thinking about but defend their views by implicit and hidden norms and hiring committees who ensure that everyone who thinks wrongly will be ruled out.3

My Undergrad Efforts to Increase Viewpoint Diversity

At my undergrad, I was one of only about 20 non-Catholic students. Over the course of four years, most non-Catholic students either converted or left the school. A few of us made it all the way through, though. Over our college years, my Lutheran roommate and I spent many hours defending Protestantism against a string of efforts to get us to cross the Tiber. These conversations showed me the value of in-person discussion.

Some of these conversations were brief and covered points of theological difference that could easily and accurately be summarized by an AI. In other cases, we debated for hours and came to a deeper understanding of why Protestants are committed to sola scriptura or why Catholics think authority is so important. I believe some of these conversations developed important nuances that AI cannot replicate. But even if our conversations hadn’t been more impressive and probing than a dialogue with AI, they had their own distinctive value. My Catholic fellow students encountered a couple of Protestants not as abstract holders of the wrong theological position or opponents to be defeated for extra time off purgatory, but as fellow humans seeking the truth about God and the world. You can’t get that just from a professor’s accurate summary of a Lutheran position on justification by faith or by Claude’s best rehashing of theological debates on theories of sanctification. Our debates added intellectual diversity by bringing actual representatives of a disfavored position into the conversation.

There’s a value to encountering resistance. I did not offer some mysterious and special Protestant way of viewing the world that they could not access as Catholics: we were talking about the same Bible verses, the same theologians, the same theological questions. But I pushed them in a way that their fellow Catholics did not. Intellectual laziness can easily take hold when the truth of the dominant view is assumed, whether that view is the Catholic magisterium, the paramount importance of social justice, or the rightness of MAGA. ChatGPT works at least as well in reassuring you that your side is right and explaining why the other positions are wrong as in pushing you to reconsider views you’ve rejected.

I didn’t convert to Catholicism and my fellow students largely continued in their beliefs, but these exchanges did increase viewpoint diversity. My roommate and I also convinced a couple of the tutors to hold an extracurricular seminar on Martin Luther. We then led a campaign to add at least one or two Protestant thinkers to the Great Books curriculum. Today, the work our seminar discussed, Martin Luther’s The Freedom of a Christian, has become part of the Junior seminar class, though paired, naturally, with Cardinal Cajetan “On Faith and Works-Against the Lutherans” and The Council of Trent’s “Decree Concerning Justification.”

Part 2 of this post addresses Hollis’ worries about privacy in the classroom.

Whether we’re talking about sexual or social desires, there’s something objectionably prudish about condemning other people’s instrumentally harmless desires on intrinsic grounds. Let a thousand flowers bloom, and save your condemnation for actions that inhibit other blooms.

This is part of Richard’s broader insistence that metaphysics, as well as being intrinsically dubious, is largely irrelevant to ethics. Richard is wrong.1 Relationships, whether with LLMs, dogs, or grizzlies, are a great place to see why metaphysics matters. And understanding relationships explains why focusing your relationship energy on an LLM is bad for your flourishing (which does not entail banning or punishing such relationships).

Richard is responding to Grace Helton’s argument that quasi-relationships with AI are bad because they degrade our capacities for friendship:

human-LLM pseudo-friendships occur when a human attempts to deploy her capacity for friendship in order to be friends with an LLM. Such humans are necessarily thwarted in the exercise of that capacity, due to the nature of the LLM. Such relationships are thus inherently disvaluable for the human in them, as they degrade her in her capacity for friendship. In effect, such relationships are at least somewhat tragic for the human who is in them.

The Splintered Mind

AI and the Degradation of the Human Capacity for Friendship

Part Two of a two-part series…

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3 months ago · 11 likes · 8 comments · Eric Schwitzgebel

The Caring Constraint: Willing the Other’s Good

I agree with Grace on this fundamental point: the fact that LLMs don’t care about you prevents you from being friends with them. This goes back to a fundamental characteristic of friendship: you are only friends with someone if you will that person’s good and that person also wills your good.2 For those who think there’s no philosophical consensus on anything, there’s a surprising amount of agreement on this point. Grace’s original post formalizes it as follows:

THE CARING CONSTRAINT

Two individuals cannot be in a friendship unless both parties in the friendship:

(i) care about each other, for the other’s sake, (the ‘caring about’ condition), and

(ii) this caring about the other disposes each party in the friendship to provide care for the other, for the other’s sake (the ‘caregiving disposition’ condition).

The Splintered Mind

ChatGPT Is Not Your Friend (guest post by Grace Helton)

by Grace Helton (guest blogger…

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4 months ago · 11 likes · 6 comments · Eric Schwitzgebel

Richard does not outright object to the Caring Constraint. Instead, he just complains about the structure: that people who treat their LLMs as friends are misusing or failing to exercise their capacities. Because this sort of failed exercise/misused capacity argument structure has been used to support conservative Catholic positions in sexual ethics that he (and the vast majority of academic philosophers) really hate, it must be bad.

Good Thoughts

Against Paternalistic Claims of "Degradation"

One of the trickier questions in ethics is when (if ever) we’re justified in paternalistic judgments that another person has misidentified their own best interests. As an objective list theorist about well-being, I do think that people can be mistaken about what’s intrinsically good or bad for them: “Some things (such as love and happiness) are inherently more worth caring about than others (such as counting blades of grass), and it makes your life go better if you attain more of the things that are truly good or worth pursuing.” We have reason to encourage our children to appreciate genuine goods—and there are…

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3 months ago · 7 likes · 4 comments · Richard Y Chappell

I’m not interested in analyzing how similar Grace’s arguments are to natural law arguments but in defending two claims Richard denies:

1. misdirected efforts at friendship and joint activities are bad for the person doing them. They are harming themselves, whether or not anyone else is directly harmed.

2. In many cases, we need to employ metaphysics to judge whether someone is wrong about their well-being and is pursuing relationships that harm them.

Richard thinks that we shouldn’t be importing abstract metaphysical terms like capacities into the kind of ethical discussions that actually matter. But the sense in which various entities exist and are capable of friendship makes a huge difference to whether attempting to befriend them and structuring your life around your relationship with that thing contributes to your well-being or actively harms you.

If You’re Wrong About the Other Person’s Care for You, You’re Wrong about Your Relationship’s Value

I follow Aristotle in thinking that friendship is one of the greatest human goods and that its value is constituted by the shared activities of love it enables.3 Activities are more valuable than capacities: doing stuff with your friends is what we value, not the mere having of friendship. But the value of these activities depends on what your relationship actually is. If you take yourself to be engaged in a friendship with something actually incapable of friendship, then the activities you are engaged in are not shared activities that express your mutual good will and care. They do not contribute to your well-being in the way you believe they do and lack the sort of value you ascribe to them.

Even when there is an existing relationship, the existence and value of the joint activities require successful causal contributions from both parties. In class, I may be explaining the text clearly but if none of my students register what I’m saying then no matter how accurate and impressive my intellectual activities were, the joint activity of learning hasn’t taken place. Similarly, if, before bed, I make a couple of witty observations to my wife about the novel I’m reading, but then discover she has already fallen asleep, we were not sharing sparkling literary conversation, even if my remarks were as witty and incisive as I believed they were. In friendships, your common activities depend jointly on both parties to the relationship. This leaves open the possibility that your activities do not have the value you think they have.

If you were to discover that your spouse does not love you or your trusted coworker despises you, this would undermine the value of your joint activities. This is true even if your belief that you were in a loving relationship with your spouse or a solid and respectful relationship with your coworker was instrumentally valuable and led to lots of positive effects in your life. The fact that your spouse or coworker was merely pretending to care for you poisons the activities you did together, even if they had not yet acted to betray you or harm your interests. And in cases like these, the outsider to the relationship with more information is often entitled to believe that the deceived person within the relationship “has misidentified their own best interests,” in Richard’s words. Metaphysically, there are cases where there is no reciprocal good will even though someone involved in that relationship has received evidence of reciprocal good will.4

Contra Richard, you are also worse off in such cases than when you fail to exercise the relevant capacities at all. Believing you are successfully doing something jointly when your activities are not what you thought they were undermines the value of what you’re doing. Given this, a metaphysics-first approach makes a lot of sense in cases where we’re unsure whether the entities involved can have good will towards us at all.

Can You Befriend a Grizzly?

This brings us to Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man (2005) and one of the great scenes on the subject of the capacity for friendship:

Werner and Timothy Treadwell, the grizzly man who is the subject of Herzog’s documentary, fundamentally disagree on the metaphysics of bears and, specifically, on their capacity for friendship with humans. And this disagreement about capacities matters.

If Werner is right, then Timothy was never friends with a grizzly, just a very misguided human, harming himself (and others). If Timothy was right, his time among the grizzlies was a way of sharing a valuable joint life and defending their joint interests in living wild and free from a corrupt human culture.

SPOILER ALERT: The grizzlies did not end up consistently treating Timothy as a friend (instead of food).

Am I unfair in picking a case where the pursuit of friendship results in Timothy’s death as well as the death of his girlfriend? I think this case just vividly illustrates what the stakes of friendship can be. But even if we change the case and Timothy is never killed and successfully lives for many years, regularly visiting bears, the value of what Timothy is doing this still depends on whether he’s actually in a relationship of mutual care with the bears. If they have no feelings or good will towards him, then he is still wasting his life. Pursuing a relationship with something that is incapable of sharing that relationship with you is a failed and meaningless project. Its pursuit harms the one pursuing in ways similar to devoting your life to counting blades of grass, a case Richard does admit is bad for the person’s well-being.

Friendship with Dogs: Do They Really Love You?

If you think Timothy’s case is a weird outlier, then let’s turn to the much more common case of man’s best friend. How valuable or harmful is it for your relationship with your dog to play a large role in your life? That depends on the metaphysical question of what dogs are capable of.

Some scientific researchers take a skeptical view: Bräuer et al. suggest that “Dogs Distinguish Authentic Human Emotions Without Being Empathic.” While dogs can pick up on the positive or negative affects of their humans, this research team finds it

unlikely that dogs are capable of sympathy or empathy. If dogs felt sorry for their owners without state matching (i.e. sympathy), they should have displayed some form of support for their owners when they were sad, such as approaching them. We also found no evidence for empathy which would require a clear distinction between self and other, as well as the ability to react to the situation.

Along similar lines Kaminski et al. have a study examining why dogs have puppy dog eyes, noting that “a muscle responsible for raising the inner eyebrow intensely is uniformly present in dogs but not in wolves.” According to their research, eye brow raises produce a facial expression that closely resembles how human faces look when sad, so its production in dogs may trigger a nurturing response in humans. They hypothesize that

dogs with expressive eyebrows had a selection advantage and that “puppy dog eyes” are the result of selection based on humans’ preferences.

So, on this account, dogs don’t have different feelings than wolves, they have just hacked a human response to a sad-looking face to gain attention and care.

If these accounts are right, then the apparent evidence of dogs’ care for their humans is misleading. It’s a result of selective advantage, and not the dog’s intrinsic feelings. There is no reciprocal care and dogs are taking advantage of us: they aren’t our friends.

How valuable playing catch with your dog is depends on the status of your relationship, which depends on the metaphysics. If the skeptics are right, dogs are exploiting evolved human tendencies to project theory of mind inappropriately and anthropomorphize facial expressions in canines. If the dog-lovers are right, however, and dogs do care for their humans, there are grounds for valuable shared activities.

Even if the dog skeptic is right, that doesn’t mean that you should immediately go around telling people to abandon their dogs. The metaphysical question has ethical implications, but practical wisdom for when questioning someone’s attachment to their dog might be appropriate is still relevant. Richard seems to assume that negative value judgments require banning a practice, but that’s just not true. Nevertheless, if dog’s lack the capacities needed for friendship, you would have grounds for forming skeptical judgments about the value many people take their relationships with their dogs to have.

Friendship with ChatGPT: You’re harming yourself even if there are positive instrumental effects.

Now let’s turn to LLMs. Chatbots use several techniques that make us tend to anthropomorphize them, including using first-person pronouns and being programmed to regularly produce verbal expressions of good will. But if there’s no will there and no genuine care, then there’s no possibility of shared activities. If you see a relationship with your favorite LLM as one of your core relationships in life, you’re harming yourself. As in the case of grizzlies or dogs, the possible harm of the relationship depends on the degree to which the relationship structures your life. The more that your supposed joint activities are central to your life’s value the more dangerous. Occasionally anthropomorphizing an LLM during a chat is not a huge issue, but coming to rely on one as a friend and confidant is.

There’s an opportunity cost dimension to this harm but the central bad is that you’ve structured your life around an activity that doesn’t have the value you take it to have. You think you’re living a life of friendship but you’re not. This harm would remain even if there were instrumental benefits to your supposed joint activities. Maybe being into grizzlies helps you meet others or maybe ChatGPT helps you develop hobbies or learn relationship tips that improve your real friendships. In these cases, those instrumental benefits don’t change the value of the central activity: you would still be harming yourself by pursuing a friendship and a joint life when that’s not possible. If your life is centered around a fake relationship, that’s bad for your well-being, full-stop!

If Richard or others disagree, I’d happy to hear where my reasoning is going wrong. I suspect that if there is a disagreement it is around the metaphysics of friendship or of canine capacities, so even if we don’t resolve the question of the value of LLM relationships, all parties can agree that metaphysics matters.

Reconfiguring our understanding of reality or changing the trajectory of an entire field is hard. Writing an article tweaking an existing problem slightly or finding one more counterexample in an ongoing debate is far, far easier. And it’s something LLMs’ recombination abilities are well set up to do. This worry isn’t merely abstract. Just this week, one major journal in a different field, Organization Science, released its findings on AI use in submissions. The journal’s AI Task Force found that submissions are up over 40% post-ChatGPT and that over 100% of this increase comes from AI-generated content. In recent months over 40% of the journal’s total submissions were significantly or entirely generated by AI (submissions that score 30-100% on AI-assistance).1 While AI-detection is imperfect, the trends here are so clear and so strong over a wide number of submissions that they’re hard to doubt.

Significantly AI-generated manuscripts (score of over 30% ) were 60-80% more likely to be desk rejected and high-AI submissions (over 70%) were 3 times less likely to receive the most common positive outcome, Revise & Resubmit. Although the rejection rates were higher, these papers were not uniformly desk-rejected. 3.2% of high-AI papers still received Revise & Resubmit decisions (that’d be a pretty decent success rate for many philosophy journals). Whether your chances of publication go up or down if you use AI becomes a matter of running the numbers. If, using AI, you can write more than 3 times as many papers as you did unaided, your overall chances of publication probably go up, even if your average acceptance percentage goes down! The incentive to try AI is even higher if your baseline acceptance rate is lower than average: if you’re not succeeding on the old pre-AI system, you’ve got little to lose.

Turning academic journals into venues for AI-generated articles is one huge issue. But even if all AI-generated submissions were rejected by the peer review process, they’d still have done significant harm by taking up more and more of the available attention of peer reviewers. The peer review system was already in danger of failing and hard to justify. If reviewers now spend half their efforts on AI-generated manuscripts that system becomes completely unsustainable. And the more often reviewers are given largely AI-generated manuscripts, the more reviewers might see AI-generated reviews as permissible or at least highly tempting.

Given this situation, it’s time to return to Jennifer Whiting’s 2015 proposal for slow philosophy:

Tenure and promotion evaluations of candidates’ research will be based exclusively on what the candidates select as their best work.

Candidates pick the 50 to 80, 000 words (3-5 articles or a book) of their publications they deem to be of the highest quality. Additional publications are not considered at all by the relevant review committees. This removes the incentive to publish more and more. Now the incentive is to wait, reflect, and only publish when your idea is as well-formulated as you can make it. Going forward, candidates are only incentivized to publish a new article if it’s better than their current five best articles. The proposal would reset incentives from quantity to quality.2

This proposal has other advantages too. Jennifer Whiting originally put it forward so that candidates would have an “easier time balancing work with other responsibilities (including civic and family ones).” Those concerns remain just as relevant. And, as I noted, the advantages of this proposal for reviewers are more and more relevant. At a time when it’s harder and harder to find referees, the request would become easier when they are only asked to look at the best a candidate can do, not every possible item of academic value.

The main worry from the commentators on Whiting’s original post was that it penalizes academics who do lots of good-enough work. Here I agree with Whiting that the current system is so strongly tilted towards this sort of productivity that bending the stick the other way is well worth doing. There might also be certain types of academic work, such as public philosophy, where quantity is what departments want to incentivize. Those could simply be evaluated separately as part of a candidate’s overall portfolio.

What reasonable limitations would look like will vary a lot with discipline. But in pretty much every discipline it’s much easier for AI-assistance to increase production of barely publishable work than increase ground-breaking insights. So there’s a strong case for almost every academic discipline to consider developing a version of slow academia. In the age of AI, we need to increase the care we pay to the most important work we’re doing. Peer review should focus attention on our best work instead of incentivizing human scholars to produce more and more to keep up with AI-generated scholarship.

Book that Challenged My Views the Most:

Islamesque: The Forgotten Craftsmen Who Built Europe's Medieval Monuments by Diana Darke.

In the art history class I took as an undergrad, the Romanesque era was presented as a medieval development where craftsmen of the Christian West created an innovative style built on Roman, Byzantine, and Germano-Celtic influences. Diana Darke’s book argues that, in fact, architects and craftsmen from the Islamic world were behind most of the innovative features of the Romanesque, including blind arches, blind arcades and ribbed vaults. Darke traces the Zigzag (Chevron) motif found at Durham Cathedral (and other Norman buildings) all the way back to ancient Egypt and then shows how it was transmitted from Fatimid Cairo to Europe via the Mediterranean and Crusader trade routes.

Similarly, Darke argues that traditions of carving stylized and mythical animals that originated in the ancient middle Eastern empires passed through Islamic empires and into European cathedral carving. The strengths of this book are the way it outlines paths of transmission across cultures of ideas and the evidence it presents for the presence of builders from the Islamic world, not just in Spain and Norman Sicily, but even in France, Germany, and Britain.

With that said, Darke’s suggestion that the Romanesque style should be renamed the Islamesque seems a provocation more than an established scholarly conclusion. Darke does not present much evidence for thinking that these architectural approaches were specifically Islamic or coming only through Islamic builders (there were many Christian builders operating in the Islamic world as well). Critics have also noted the way Darke downplays the considerable Byzantine influences on architecture in medieval Sicily and Lombardy.

The Broken Compass

Review: Islamesque: The Forgotten Craftsmen who Built Europe's Medieval Monuments by Diane Darke

By the end of the 11th century, Muslim Europe was in retreat. In Spain, Christian kingdoms were slowly pushing south, while in Sicily over 200 years of Islamic rule had been ended by the Norman conqu…

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2 years ago · 19 likes · 13 comments · Mathew Lyons

Darke is also willing to appeal to dubious evidence to further her story such as legends written down centuries later about the origins of medieval abbeys or local guidebooks. There’s also lots of ambiguous evidence. Does the use of Arabic numerals on pillars imply Islamic builders or just more educated or mathematically inclined builders than historians have assumed?

Despite the overreach, this book gave me a new perspective on medieval building and made me think more about all the cultural connections across cultures, languages, and religions in this period. Most people assume sharp divisions between religions and cultures during the medieval period—the clash of civilizations narrative—but scholars insist that medieval history is characterized at least as much by trade, overlap, and cultural connections between the medieval Latin, Islamic, and Byzantine worlds. This book vividly shows some of those connections. It also made me excited to visit more of these cathedrals and fortresses in the future!

Classic I Hadn’t Read Before (Ancient)

The Lives of the Caesars by Suetonius. This summer my family got to visit Italy together for the first time. I wanted to go back and read up on ancient Rome before visiting and took this as an occasion to read Suetonius in the translation of top podcaster, Tom Holland.

Suetonius may not have the insight and political perspective of Tacitus, but he does have a flair for the dramatic. I found the depictions of the imperial inner circle the most interesting part. Roman leaders are in charge of the largest empire the world had ever seen, governing millions, but much of that bureaucracy is still being improvised and is organized in terms of the emperor’s personal household and idiosyncracies. This makes it fascinating to see what the various emperors prioritize in terms of public shows and presence and how their personal habits and choices connect with affairs of state. For more on Suetonius and Holland’s translation, read John Byron Kuhner’s excellent review.

John Byron Kuhner

What Is Interesting and Notable About Suetonius

Sometimes an editor sends you a perfect assignment. Out of the email blue yonder came a message from Matthew Schmitz, editor of Compact Magazine. He and I met years ago in a bar in New York City, where in conversation he figured out that I had written the…

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a year ago · 8 likes · John Byron Kuhner

Along with this, I enjoyed Robert Graves’ I, Claudius for the first time. It’s amazingly successful in turning Tacitus, Suetonius, and other sources into a compelling novel and making you sympathize with an often-mocked emperor. Claudius the God and His Wife Messalina was still entertaining but didn’t have the same punch and satisfaction and wasn’t as successful in its interiority as the first.

Classic I Hadn’t read Before (Modern)

Moby-Dick or, The Whale by Herman Melville. I’m still digesting this. There are some amazing chapters on human ambition and Melville gives such a vivid sense of each of the Pequod’s officers. It’s also interesting to compare the psychology of whaling adventurers with today’s crypto bros and venture capitalists. The Lee Shore, Chapter 23, is maybe the best page of writing I read all year. Then there are some very long, not-so-rewarding chapters. The relationships between the characters and their motivations are often highly underdeveloped. I’m glad I read it, but I’m not yet willing to fight for its continued place in the literary canon.

Book that Is a Classic, even if you’ve been turned off of it by Stoic Bros:

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations. Hammond’s translation is reasonably accurate while also getting the pithiness and force of Marcus’ writing across. I like how much this works reads as Marcus’ genuine admonitions to himself, not something just performed for others. You get a powerful sense of how Marcus is struggling with fear of death and some of his troubles and uncertainties as well as his continued commitment to Stoicism as a response. That authenticity is something those of us writing philosophy today should be more open to. Aurelius’s repeated use of the conditional— either providence or atoms and void— where he fully explores not just the implications of the canonical Stoic position but the other philosophical alternatives is an honest and underexplored move. Too many philosophical discussions focus on the intricacies of a particular position instead of being open about what the writer thinks all the live possibilities are and how each of them would affect the meaning of life or what happens at death.

Favorite Book I Reread this Year.

Gilead by Marilynne Robinson. Such a beautiful book! This time I was struck by how Robinson gets at the persistent division in the US and how those divisions play out over generations. The most uncompromising divisions are often between family. The resulting picture is sad, but the novel still holds out hope for transformation.

Oddest Book I Read This Year:

I Who Have Never Known Men, Jacqueline Harpman. There were some other strong contenders in a year when I also read whatever Vladimir Nabokov’s Ada, or Ardor is and Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Blue Flower, a historical novel on the perplexing romance between Friedrich von Hardenberg, who is in the process of becoming the poet-philosopher Novalis, and Sophie von Kühn, a seemingly unremarkable teenage girl. But Harpman’s was still the oddest. Published in France in the 1990s, it was only recently translated and has been gaining attention. Harpman’s protagonist is the youngest of a group of 40 imprisoned women and, unlike the others who were captured mid-life, does not remember any other way of living or remember what a world with men is like. It’s sort of scifi, but so pared down and interior that it reads completely differently from most space or survival epics. Even in this imagined future with impressive technology, women still need to do all the complex tasks of mid-century French housewives. Haunting, spare, and sad, even if I didn’t really understand the what or why behind the story.

Challenges for 2026

Inspired by Michael W. Austin’s post, I wanted to focus on qualitative challenges more than just picking a number for Goodreads.

Rediscovering the Way

My 2025 in Books Plus Choosing What to Read in 2026

I hadn’t planned to publish something here again until next year, as I’m working on a refresh of this Substack plus a possible related podcast. But as I thought about the books I’d read this year, and the books I plan to read in 2026, I decided to share about both with you here before the end of the year…

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8 months ago · 3 likes · 2 comments · Michael W. Austin

Here are the reading challenges I’m taking on for the coming year. I’d love to hear which of these appeal to you or which you’d add. I’ll see if I manage all 10 in 2026:

1. Read a book slowly and carefully.

2. Read books written in at least ten different centuries

3. Read a book translated from a language or culture I haven’t explored before.

4. Read a modern classic I’ve never gotten around to reading.

5. Read a medieval/ancient classic I’ve never gotten around to reading.

6. Re-read one of my favorite books.

7. Read a book of poetry.

8. Read up on a particular subject.

9. Read a book I think I’ll disagree with.

10. Read a book purely for fun.

I’ve ordered W.H. Auden’s poems for #7 but I don’t yet have particular choices in mind for the others. In the summer, I’ll probably see how many centuries I’ve covered and look for books to expand my time horizon.

I’m an academic who believes that the university system needs profound reform. I agree with a number of the points made by critics who support, or at least want to engage with, the compact the current administration has proposed to nine universities. I agree with Danielle Allan that “our universities have failed to contribute as they might to [civic strength] by allowing civic education to erode, by abandoning a commitment to pluralism that includes viewpoint diversity, and by failing to achieve approaches to admission and credentialing that are broadly experienced as fair.” I agree with Marc Rowan that “a high degree of uniformity of thought among faculty members and administrators…can result in a hostile environment for students with different ideas.”

I’ve experienced that hostility at multiple points in my academic career. When a member of a hiring department, after pointedly asking about how I would teach the ethics of abortion, found out that, in addition to Judith Jarvis-Thompson’s famous defense of abortion, I had once assigned an article by Robert P. George and Patrick Lee arguing against the moral permissibility of abortion, my candidacy was doomed.1 The offended member quickly moved behind the scenes to argue against the search committee’s enthusiastic recommendation in my favor. One of my grad school professors known for her work defending the morality of abortion called on my behalf and insisted that I would make a perfectly acceptable department member but to no avail. The search ended without a hire and the search committee chair informed me that the department did not move forward due to concerns about my “collegiality” (one of the factors the AAUP has historically insisted should not be used in hiring or promotion). Someone who might teach an article by Robbie George was obviously beyond the pale and couldn’t be let in the department. In my view, universities and faculty need to be incentivized to include multiple relevant viewpoints and to avoid selecting faculty on the basis of ideological commitments or conformity to the prevailing culture.2 I also believe that when universities have engaged in discriminatory hiring practices on the basis of race, gender, or other legally protected characteristics, they should be appropriately punished, following due process.3

But the proposed compact recently sent by the administration to nine colleges is fundamentally unacceptable because it makes all federal funding conditional on the institution continuing to comply with the compact’s demands. It would allow a presidential administration to cut all funding, not because of legal findings that a university broke laws to which it is subject or failed to comply with congressionally approved regulations, but based simply on the judgments of administration officials that the university failed to meet vague and underspecified conditions. Danielle Allan (along with many others supporting engagement) fails to distinguish what universities should be willing to negotiate on—how to serve public goals promoted through discretionary funding and specific programs—from what cannot be subject to negotiation—tying an institution’s basic existence to the priorities of the administration in power.

The Renovator

How Higher Ed Should Engage with the Government

Last week I made an argument that the group of universities invited to engage with the Trump administration around a compact for excellence in higher education should coordinate to do three things: (1) refuse to sign the compact as drafted; (2) work together to frame a new social contract for higher education; and (3) steer their proposal toward the con…

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a year ago · 10 likes · 4 comments · Danielle Allen

Should accepting federal funding allow the federal government to decide what a university teaches and whom it hires? Here’s the position J.D. Vance, the current Vice President of the United States, presented in 2021:

“What do you do at the Department of Education? Well, you do what Viktor Orbán has done in Hungary, which is basically say, ‘You’re not allowed to teach critical race theory anymore, you’re not allowed to teach critical gender theory anymore … You’re not allowed to do those things and get a dollar of federal money or a dollar of state money.”

On this view, federal and state authorities should be able to fully regulate the content of classes. Any type of public funding entitles state and federal governments to regulate every aspect of the university. The administration’s proposal makes all access to any federal benefit—including student loans, visas, and even tax-exempt status—contingent on the institution’s continuing adherence to whatever conditions the federal administration imposes, something Joseph Fishkin at Balkinization rightly points out.

Does that sound like overreach? Well, Bryan Caplan says, “If you don’t like it, be Hillsdale.” This is a common retort to people who worry about excessive federal regulation of colleges. If any institution of higher learning has a problem with federal mandates about their curriculum or hiring, they can just opt out of federal funding and emulate the small conservative college in Michigan whose brand is centered around not taking federal funds. That’s the advice Hillsdale College’s president Larry Arn gave to Harvard in its disputes with the current administration: “the obvious solution would be, don’t take the money from the government, which is what we do.” Unfortunately, the Hillsdale model is not reproducible.

Being ineligible for federal funds is not an option open to the kind of universities that educate over 95% of US students. Now and for the foreseeable future almost all students in the US will be educated in institutions that accept federal funding. The question is whether the federal government should be entitled to comprehensively define the missions and operations of a wildly diverse group of institutions serving more than 19 million Americans.

Three Kinds of Federal Funding

That’s what the higher education compact proposed by the current administration maintains. The introduction states: “Institutions of higher education are free to develop models and values other than those below, if the institution elects to forego federal benefits.” (my italics) Media discussion of the compact hasn’t sufficiently recognized how radical this is. The compact is not just about research grants. There are three very distinct categories of federal funding. The first category is basic access to and eligibility for any type of financial benefit, including access to student loans, approval of student visas, and the institution’s non-profit treatment under the tax code. The compact explicitly threatens the loss of this eligibility in addition to cutting for research funding of the sort supported by the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation, the second funding category. A researcher or a university’s access to these two categories should only require basic compliance with existing legal requirements.

There is a third category of funding that involves special grants or incentives for public purposes, including things such as serving specific populations, providing specific worktraining programs, offering certain types of classes (e.g. civic education) and other similar focused grants. These all involve contestable judgments about what benefits the public and what the purpose of higher education should be. I agree with proponents of reform that public authorities can and should use this category to advance public purposes and increase or decrease schools’ funding accordingly. These priorities and grants will appropriately change depending on the priorities of the current Congress and the President. For funding in this category, Congress and the President can ask individual schools to make a choice and decide whether they want to apply for this funding or structure their programs and student bodies so as to receive certain benefits. Academics should not be outraged (as many of us are) at the thought that legislators have some influence on universities and their budgets. Education for public purposes does need to be responsive to the public through duly elected representatives.

In the areas of research and basic eligibility, though, the federal government should impose a minimal set of legal standards that persists over multiple presidential administrations and is consistently enforced. Sally Kornbluth, in MIT’s response to the compact, correctly notes that “scientific funding should be based on scientific merit alone.” Past administrations have overreached in tying too much research funding to conditions unrelated to research excellence. They have also attempted to mandate excessively specific and questionable regulations on colleges (e.g. the title IX sexual harassment procedures put forward in 2011, which raised issues of due process and did not endure). But the proposed compact goes way further than previous administrations by attempting to subject all funding to a very specific set of demands, potentially placed on all institutions, regardless of mission or context.

If my institution were part of this compact and I, a philosophy faculty member (and also the department chair), publicly say that “Ayn Rand is a bad philosopher who misinterprets Aristotle” (a statement I believe to be true), I am at risk of being found guilty of purposefully belittling conservative ideas. Yes, belittling will become an official and grave charge if this vision for American higher education takes over. The compact puts it right up there with sparking violence as an offense that requires “transforming or abolishing institutional units.” My rash public statement would not only put my whole philosophy department at risk but potentially deprive my institution of all eligibility for federal funds. A philosophy department that refuses to teach the wisdom of Ayn Rand (to my knowledge, she’s never featured in my department’s course offerings) could ruin the educational prospects of thousands. I think philosophy departments should have more influence, but maybe not that much.

Defenders of this proposal present it as a choice. Marc Rowan, the man behind much of the language in the proposed compact, states:

“No school will be forced to adhere to the compact’s principles of fairness, civility, neutrality and transparency. If schools do not want to be accountable to these requirements, they need not accept federal funding.”

Being ineligible for federal funds is an option for only a tiny number of institutions serving a tiny number of students. There is no scalable model that could allow the US institutions that serve the vast majority of our students to operate in the absence of eligibility for federal funds.

There’s No Hillsdale Model for Universities (Unless There’s a St. Jude’s Model for Hospitals)

Consider an analogy with healthcare: there are a tiny number of hospitals that could operate without federal funding. St Jude’s Children’s Hospital receives revenue covering over 70% of its operating budget from donations and its endowment. While it could continue to operate without access to government funding, no one thinks that St. Jude’s provides an exciting new model to solve the problems with the US healthcare system. The thousands of smaller institutions that serve all kinds of communities throughout the US can’t copy St. Jude’s: there just aren’t enough donors who are willing and able to give enough money to cover the majority of expenses for most people.

The Numbers on Non-Federally Funded Institutions

The case in higher education is similar. Right now, there are only around twenty institutions of higher education that do not accept federal funds. Hillsdale (1600 students), Grove City College (2400), and Pensacola Christian College (4500) are the largest colleges and then there are several seminaries, with Southern Baptist Theological Seminary featuring the highest enrollment (4200 students).4 All told, these institutions likely enroll around 16 000 of the 19.2 million post-secondary students in the US, .1% of all students.5 That’s about the same number of enrolled students as the institution I teach at i.e. the 21st largest state’s third largest higher education institution.

Even within this group, Hillsdale is an outlier. Being the first and most prominent institution in this category gives it a brand, something it leverages through its Imprimis newsletter (my mother-in-law made sure that my family is on the subscription list!), boat cruises, Fox News appearances and more. It receives 71.1% of its revenues from donations and investment income and less than 20% of its revenues from tuition. This allows it to offer its students an affordable education. But it’s an outlier even in this small category. While Grove City manages to receive 57% of its revenue from donations and investment income, Christendom is at 34%, Patrick Henry College is around 30%, and Pensacola Christian only receives around 25%. New St. Andrew’s, Doug Wilson’s Reformed college in Idaho, is representative of a number of small colleges in this category, receiving 76.6% of its revenue from student tuition and only 23% from donations and investment income, while enrolling 393 students. Colleges like this rely on small groups of highly committed and highly religiously or ideologically motivated students and parents who are willing to pay way more than average (historically, students and parents have only covered about one third of the overall production cost of their education) and forego educational benefits in order to be at the type of radically differentiated institution they prefer.

It is also misleading to describe such institutions as entirely independent and entirely principled. Even without taking any federal funds, Hillsdale is still unable to avoid federal government involvement, spending considerable sums lobbying to avoid being subject to the taxes lawmakers have imposed on other wealthy higher education institutions. All these institutions are also highly dependent on a small pool of wealthy donors with their own priorities, putting pressure on these colleges to maintain stances in line with donor preferences. While historically known for its principled embrace of free markets and its long-running Free-Market Forum, when the current administration proposed huge increases on tariffs levels with all US trading partners, a number of Hillsdale politics professors were ready to step forward and insist the proposed tariffs were precisely what the USA needs at this moment.6 Independence from all government oversight can also allow for a culture of unaccountability, as in the case of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary where, from 2002-2022 , “annual operating expenses increased by 35% while SBC FTE enrollment decreased by 67%. The result of this failure to reduce operating expenditures was a $140.1 million cumulative operating deficit from 2002-2022.” More than $1.5 million was spent on “renovations, furnishings and related expenses to the president’s home” from 2019-22, at a time when the seminary was cutting faculty positions and other staff. The seminary is now on probation from its accreditor, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges, and at risk of completely losing this accreditation.

Even setting aside concerns about donor influence and governance, these institutions face serious checks on growth due to the small number of students who are willing and able to pay for all of their tuition and living expenses without any access to federal grants or loans. But let’s assume that a renewed attention on the dangers of federal involvement leads to a blossoming of interest in non-federally funded institutions. If, in 10 years, the US system has 10 times as many institutions operating on this model serving 10 times as many students, we would still only get to 200 000 students total, i.e. 1% of the total student population.

The Numbers on Rich Institutions

What about the wealthy institutions? There’s a somewhat larger set of institutions with very large endowments and a wealthy donor base. But these institutions have their endowments and their access to rich donors in significant part because of the cutting-edge research they perform thanks to federal funding: their prestige and financial stability is not as independent of the government as it might seem. This is why these 9 institutions were targeted for the compact. There are 23 institutions in the US with endowments of 1 million or more per student, allowing them to easily cover educational expenses of $50 000 per student per year. However, these institutions only serve 120 000 students, .63% of the total. Even if we expand out to the 50 richest institutions in per student endowment, they educate only 495 000 out of the 19.4 million students in the US, less than 3% of students.7 If we assume that these institutions could work out a model to cover their costs without any government involvement and that the percentage of students served by these institutions doubled, they would only cover 5% of US students. Adding in the 200 000 students hypothetically covered by the expanded group of principled refusers of federal funding would still only get us to 6% of the student population.

So even on an extremely optimistic scenario for non-federally funded institutions, 94% of students will still be attending institutions that rely on federal funding. Both the independent and the wealthy/prestigious sets of institutions have cost and revenue models that are wildly different than the median in the sector and there’s no plausible way to extend these models to cover most institutions. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, since 1970, voluntary support for degree-granting postsecondary institutions has never covered more than 10% of total expenditures. Private funds for 50% or more of educational costs just aren’t available. At best, only two to four hundred post-secondary institutions out of around 3900 degree granting institutions and 5700 total would be exempt from federal regulation. So what about the rest of these institutions? Should the federal government should get to define the missions and operating procedures of every college, public and private, religious and secular?

Conclusion: A Diversity of Institutions and Missions

The vast majority of higher education is based around joint investment from students and public entities, with a great degree of flexibility on institution’s missions and how they are run. This system is much more successful than any other in the world. Destroying it would be a disaster for the US. The attempt to impose uniformity—where all institutions would be governed by the same neutrality requirements, the same tuition structures, and the same restrictions on faculty hiring and program offerings—would hamper the real diversity of ideas and ideologies that true advocates of reform want. The idea that the federal government is the appropriate authority to set grade policy, regulate faculty hiring, and impose tuition prices for a Catholic liberal arts college of 400 students, a private research university of 6000, and an open access urban public university of 16 000 is ridiculous.8 The public would also not be served by selecting a small group of favored universities who get lavish access to federal funds while thousands of institutions serving the vast majority of students are ignored. I want to see higher education work better through adding more voices, not by threatening students, faculty, and boards into staying within narrow bounds of government-approved missions.

Accepting government funding does not entail allowing the government to dictate what an institution’s mission should be. In 2017, the Supreme Court ruled 7-2 that the State of Missouri could not withhold publicly available funding for building playgrounds from the Trinity Lutheran Church’s daycare center because of the church’s religious character and mission. The court held that:

the Free Exercise Clause protects against “indirect coercion or penalties on the free exercise of religion, not just outright prohibitions.” Lyng, 485 U. S., at 450. Trinity Lutheran is not claiming any entitlement to a subsidy. It is asserting a right to participate in a government benefit program without having to disavow its religious character. The express discrimination against religious exercise here is not the denial of a grant, but rather the refusal to allow the Church—solely because it is a church—to compete with secular organizations for a grant.

So too, in higher education, institutions providing education should both be allowed to operate and to compete for grants regardless of their religious or secular character and whether or not their mission is favored by the administration in power.

While I believe that institutional neutrality is an appropriate policy for most public and many private schools, it should not be required for access to federal funds. A Quaker school should be allowed to oppose US military operations and refuse to host ROTC programs, a Catholic school should be allowed to fund pro-life outreach without funding abortion-access outreach programs, a Jewish school should be allowed to support the existence of Israel as a Jewish state (if it takes that to be an appropriate expression of its communal commitments), and colleges whose mission is devoted to social justice or the environment can also express that corporately, supporting appropriate programs and centers without ipso facto losing access to any federal benefits.9 This is vital to the freedom of higher education, especially for religious institutions or other colleges with their own distinctive missions. A free society will grant eligibility for public funds to all institutions that comply with basic legal requirements. Colleges should be free to define their own missions instead of requiring all institutions to adopt a single federally-approved mission and set of operating procedures to be allowed access to any benefits.

Disclaimer: This piece expresses my own personal opinion and does not express the views of my department, institution, or any other group with which I am affiliated.

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I’m never going to get a tattoo, but if I did it would be of NOUS, the ancient Greek word for reason or understanding.1 So, as a long-time nous-defender, I need to start my Substack by standing up for reason and truth, against perception and phenomenology. Brian Cutter’s ranking of anti-physicalist arguments cannot stand!

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Anti-Physicalist Arguments: A Tier-List

The following is a guest post from the philosopher Brian Cutter. Brian’s an excellent philosopher—good at forming beliefs on most subjects other than the truth of Catholicism. He’s one of the inventors of both the psychophysical harmony argument and the…

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a year ago · 48 likes · 57 comments · Bentham's Bulldog

You obviously can’t trust a tier-list from someone who’s ignorant of S-tier and won’t even use letter grades. Even worse, Brian stuck his insulting dismissal of the Peripatetic tradition right at the end of a very long post. Brian may be trying to avoid going on the record as saying Aristotle and Aquinas give F-tier arguments, but I’m here at last to speak up for the mobs of Thomists who would have been enraged if they’d gotten to the end of the post. After all the love Brian’s been getting lately—check out his excellent and prize-winning essay on the omission theodicy— someone needs to stand up to him!2

I share Brian’s suspicions of physicalism and many of our theological and philosophical commitments overlap, but I’m approaching things from a rather different direction, as someone who works on ancient and medieval philosophy of mind and wants to think through which arguments in these thinkers still hold up. This post is on overall approaches to what’s distinctive about human minds and what’s hardest to explain on physicalist accounts. I have plans for two follow-up posts, one on how to fix Brian’s composition argument against physicalism (one of its premises is false, which is a bad thing in an argument) and one on a historically important argument against physicalism that Brian doesn’t even discuss, but is related to Descartes’ simplicity argument.3

The Limits of Phenomenology: Perception and Aphantasia

I’m sympathetic to Brian’s starting point: the intuition that physical states and mental experiences are distinct is extremely powerful and worth examining. Brian sees the strongest anti-physicalist arguments as relying on phenomenology based on perceptual examples. In contrast, I’d put arguments that rely on phenomenological stuff and perception in the B tier, not S or A, whereas I see arguments related to what Brian calls rational insight as the top-tier ones. There are two sorts of reasons for this. I’m more confident that reason is something distinct from physical states and hard to explain in physical terms than mere consciousness, because I’m more confident in my own experience of rational understanding as something transparent (in the best cases) and as distinct from my physical states. Physicalist reductive explanation also seem to have a better chance of working for perceptual phenomenology than for universal reasoning.

You might think that focusing on phenomenology grounds us in something that is relatively common to human experience as opposed to intellectual achievements that are not experienced central to all human life. I don’t think that’s a good reason to prioritize perceptual phenomenology though. Some things I do as a human being are quite common and central to my living e.g. digestion, but aren’t cases that push hard on the physicalist.4 The traditional approach is to focus on the cases that are distinctive of humans at our best, even if these represent only a very small proportion of what humans do. Plus rational reflection on essences or on my own self-understanding is available to you, a person considering my arguments, in at least as direct a way as perceptual experience, so I don’t think there’s any significant loss of applicability.

Sensory quality arguments are based on both the aboutness and the phenomenology of your perceptual experience. My appearance is of or directed towards redness, not blueness or saltiness, and roundness, not squareness or squishiness. Then there’s the phenomenology of the experience itself – what it’s like to experience redness, roundness and the distinct feelings those appearances involve in me as a conscious being, where my phenomenology potentially differs from physical duplicates lacking phenomenology but also potentially from other conscious creatures with different ways of being appeared to by the world (e.g. bats or whales). I don’t think the aboutness of perception is as focused and distinctive as in the case of thoughts. Thoughts are more intensional and more distinct. As Descartes notes in his sixth Meditation, a chiliagon (a thousand sided rectilinear figure) is distinct in thought from a myriagon (a tethousand sided rectilinear figure), but my perceptual experience of the chiliagon and myriagon are not clearly distinct. Indeed, despite being rectilinear figures, my perceptual experience of them isn’t even distinct from my perception of a circle! Wikipedia provides this helpful illustration:

Even if we leave the aboutness aside and focus on the phenomenology of the perceptual experience itself, I’m not convinced that perceptual phenomenology is as universally experienced or as powerful as the phenomenology of successful thinking. We’re getting increasing evidence that the phenomenology of sensory experience and imagination isn’t the same for everyone. Recent investigations have uncovered a wide spectrum, including people with aphantasia, i.e. severe limitations in formulating sensory images, and hyperphantasia, an ability to produce extraordinary clear and detailed images.5

Personally, I can imagine and rotate 3-dimensional objects but most of the time my efforts to imagine objects are somewhat drained of color and life.6 The red ball is barely red and much of the vividness that the phenomenology isn’t there in my mind’s eye in the way that it is when I’m actually seeing a red ball. I do wonder if philosophers who are higher in aphantasia find phenomenological arguments less convincing than those with vivid imaginations.7

The Power of Universal and Necessary Truths

Where I am confident is in knowing what it’s like to grasp (a few) universal and necessary truths: it’s awesome!!! I go over the ancient Greek proof for an unlimited number of prime numbers every time I talk about what’s possible to conceive or not with my students, and every time it works! Check it out here if you haven’t gotten to enjoy it yet! Anyone who doesn’t find that proof or other universal and necessary arguments that succeed awesome doesn’t really grasp those truths. Unfortunately, these days a lot of people are allowed to enter the Academy while being ignorant of geometry. Plato had a point: if you haven’t yet done Euclid, symbolic logic, or some similarly universal proof, you won’t appreciate the force of claims about rational insight in the same way. Mastering some proofs will help you see that there are universal and necessary truths you can grasp.

Universal and necessary truths provide us with the basis for an upgraded version of Brian’s sensory quality argument.8 We have some thoughts that essentially relate us to universal and necessary truths, but no plausible physicalist view can accommodate this fact, so physicalism is false. What sort of thoughts? I think there are many such thoughts, but the most obvious thoughts are the ones that are about evident truths that are universal and necessary. Brian discusses some of this under his rational intuition argument, but in my view the strongest argument in this area doesn’t rely on any specific positive theory of rational intuition. It’s based simply on the negative claim that physicalism can’t account for knowledge of the kind that humans can have. We don’t need to determine whether we have some special faculty of rational intuition or whether some of our knowledge is a priori or it all derives from experience and perception in some way. The important thing is that I know some things in a way that ensures my knowledge is essentially true, objective, universal, and necessary.

The Universality and Necessity Argument against Physicalism

Can physicalism account for this? No, we can run a version of Brian’s sensory qualities argument, replacing the phenomenal properties and appearances Brian focuses on with universality and necessity.

1. Understanding P, where P is a universal and necessary truth (e.g. there is no limit to the number of prime numbers), requires knowing P to be true universally and necessarily. That is: necessarily, for any individual S, if S understands P, then it is apparent to S that P obtains necessarily and universally.

2. None of your physical properties, except perhaps certain of your extrinsic/historical properties, entail having an appearance of something as universally and necessarily true (or, indeed, any significant relation to universality and necessity).

3. The properties of “applying universally” and “necessarily true” aren’t extrinsic/historical properties.

4. Therefore, the properties of understanding aren’t identical to physical properties.

The same sort of issue Brian mentions in the case of phenomenology arises here. For any relevant intrinsic neural property, we can fully spell out what it is to have that property without any reference to universality or necessity, simply in terms of arrangements and firing rates of neurons. I’m not sure there’s a neat analogue for swampman (irrational swampman who has all the neurons firing but fails to appreciate the universality of the argument’s premises about numbers?) or a Boltzmann brain, but I don’t find those cases the most convincing anyway.

There’s no prime number tracking part of animal perception nor is there a prime tracking part of the brain. Among your intrinsic neural properties, none entail, none essentially involve, any interesting relations to universality or necessity. Whatever account of causation is going on when you think about prime numbers or what it is to be limited doesn’t track the universal and necessary features of these numbers.

I’m inclined to agree with Brian that physicalist accounts of perceptual phenomenology fail, but I’m less confident that they’re doomed to fail for perception than I am convinced of the distinctness of universality and necessity from neural structure. Even if the physicalist approach to representation tracking works for perception and is somewhat reliable, it won’t help us get to affirming universal and necessary truths as universal and necessary. Reliably encoding information does not get us all the way to a rational grasp on something. That’s why David Chalmers’ “Inferentialism, Australian style” takes the most promising reductive approach to be two-tiered: using one type of reductive account (e.g. causal or teleological) to get “simple representations, typically perceptual or nonconceptual representations” and then attempting to use another “theory for complex or conceptual representations.” I still don’t see how these two tiers can work together to solve the problem. The prospects that a reductive account can get us modal features like necessity or possibility or a determination of whether something obtains universally vs. in a particular case are rather dim. And there isn’t another physicalist account for how physical structures could get us all the way to universality and necessity. They’re simply a different kind of thing. So, in my judgment, they offer an even stronger instance of a type of argument Brian already wants to run against physicalism.

Defending the Aristotelian Tradition

How does this relate to the alleged F-tier argument of Aristotle and Aquinas that Brian insults? I read Aristotle and Aquinas’s arguments against physicalism (and versions of them in other figures such as Ibn-Sina or Moses Maimonides) as having two parts. The first part is a negative claim: what the mind does in universally grasping what something is, in a way that tracks its necessity and possibility, can’t be accounted for by matter or any combinations of material structures as such. Even causal connections to objects perceived are not sufficient to account for the intentionality of cognition or the way our grasp on reality, at its best, is objective, universal, and necessary.

The second part is the positive account Aristotle and those in his tradition give of the intentionality of cognition, in terms of preservation of form with a special kind of taking on of form done by the mind in successful activities of understanding.9 Brian doesn’t like this account. I think there’s more to be said on behalf of this approach to intentionality and the philosophy of mind, especially if you can make the case that a hylomorphic view of humans can accommodate the Personal Identity Argument—affirming that I, as a person, persist through time while remaining self-identical in a transitive, objective, one-one way—while retaining a more unified and deeper connection between personal identity and the body than substance dualists.10

But even if you don’t like the positive accounts of reason and human nature developed in the Peripatetic tradition, you could still be convinced by their arguments against physicalist accounts of intentionality and rational insight. And there are a lot more options available to non-physicalists to explain intentionality and the universality and necessity of understanding, whether that’s via some special sort of intuition, as Brian suggests, or other features of reality. This is especially the case, if as both Aristotle and Aquinas do in somewhat different ways, you think Nous itself is fundamental to reality.

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