It was July 2005, and what had seemed impossible just half a year earlier was actually happening. I had defended my PhD dissertation in Linguistics and was finishing the supplemental chapter my committee had asked for. After eight years at Cornell I would in fact be moving on from graduate school.
A few weeks after filing I headed west and landed in the Bay Area on Labor Day in full post-academic mode, having half-heartedly applied for a few faculty positions in places I didn’t want to live. I’d chosen to come to the Bay Area because it was where I knew the greatest number of people, including fellow Oberlin graduates, who as it turns out were disproportionately represented in public radio: the hosts of Radiolab, several This American Life contributors, even a couple of Philosophy Talk’s eventual Roving Philosophical Reporters.
Despite having no formal training in journalism or broadcasting beyond a blues show in college (and deejaying 300+ mixtapes in highschool), I had my eye on the Bay Area radio ecosystem as a place for some kind of fulfilling post-academic work. Growing up in Montreal my family listened to a lot of American public radio from Vermont and upstate New York. Some of the CBC programs we listened to—The Scales of Justice, Peter Gzowski’s bookish interviews, the Royal Canadian Air Farce comedy shows—had brainy counterparts on NPR and other local public radio stations that we picked up on road trips around New England.
It was in grad school that I really got a sense of the intellectual possibilities of public radio. Ithaca’s NPR station was a fairly typical one, but there was a smaller station out of William and Hobart Smith College in Geneva, NY that carried a whole array of quirky, locally-produced public affairs programs. One that stands out in my memory was Plato’s Cave. Hosted by two boisterous political science professors, it was entertaining, challenging, and fearless (and female-led, I might add).
The rubber met the road when a friend turned me on to a relatively new program, Philosophy Talk, hosted by a pair of Stanford professors who wanted, in their words, to “do philosophy on the radio.” He had previously sent me an episode they’d done with Geoff Nunberg, a relatively well-known linguist (thanks to his Fresh Air commentaries)—a whole hour of language talk on the radio. Now, however, it seemed they might have an opening—get in touch with them!
The first broadcast I attended was in October 2005, an episode about the 18th century idealist philosopher George Berkeley, about whom I knew not very much. By the following April I’d been hired as Production Coordinator and was on duty for an episode that asked What Is Art? I would learn much of the technical side of audio production on the job. But more significantly, I would learn that this “program that questions everything—except your intelligence” took its motto seriously. It stood for something: shedding light rather than heat on topics of the day by questioning assumptions and seeking to think about things in new ways.
But it also stood for a different kind of intellectual freedom. Before podcasts, it was rare on broadcast radio to hear longform conversations that dug deep into a single topic. NPR listeners in particular were accustomed to the 8-minute conversations of the national magazine shows. But Philosophy Talk provided a space to just… think. A few months after I began working on the program, the station moved it from its original Tuesday afternoon timeslot to Sunday mornings as part of a new Sunday morning “thought block.” The tagline in our own promotion of the move referred to “your Sunday morning thought show.” We stood for providing a space on the radio to indulge the life of the mind.
20 years and more than 600 episodes later, that spirit of thinking philosophically about anything and everything—probing the underlying principles that lead people to think what they do—still animates the program. And yet the program also takes a stand in a different way. The hosts are adept at talking through positions they may not hold personally but could imagine a reasonable person believing; it’s what they do for the first five minutes of most episodes. That said, I remember Ken Taylor telling me about one of their earliest episodes, Marriage and the State, where he found it impossible to find good non-religious arguments for the state’s denial of the right of same-sex partners to marry. He vowed that Philosophy Talk would not take on topics where they could not defend more than one position on rational, philosophical grounds. So, for example, none of our episodes on climate offer any attempt to argue philosophically that global warming is not a thing. That sort of both-sides forced objectivity is precisely what motivated the hosts to take a stand for the value of philosophy in public discourse.
Of course, not every episode takes on a topic that has “sides” to be argued for and against. Some of our favorite shows are the ones where we simply get to explore what some smart person in the past—or present!—has thought. I’m certainly grateful that so much of my work since leaving academia still involves living a life of the mind. It’s definitely something worth taking a stand for.
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