While I was in Scotland last summer, Sabrina MisirHiralall emailed to request an interview for the APA’s blog. It appeared online last week.
At the link is the interview, in which I discuss ocean waves, mountain biking, whisky, Natalie Diaz, Diverse Intelligences, and personal identity. https://blog.apaonline.org/2019/12/06/apa-member-interview-phillip-barron/
What makes someone the same person over time?
This is the question that Teaching Predoctoral Fellow Phillip Barron hopes to answer in his first year in the Lewis & Clark philosophy department. Having completed the necessary coursework at the University of Connecticut, he is now at LC working on the first year of a two-year predoctoral fellowship, and currently teaching PHIL 217: Conceptions of Selfhood and Personal Identity. In his Ph.D. dissertation, he hopes to give a new perspective of the idea of personal identity through narrative theory.
“(Narrative theorists) are people who say that an essential part of your identity revolves around the stories that you tell about yourself,” Barron said. “My argument is that narrative theory is … the only (theory) that can say, ‘This is why psychological continuity matters, this is why bodily continuity matters.’”
Read the rest of the interview/profile at the Pioneer Log, the student-run newspaper at Lewis & Clark College.
My friend and colleague Cody Turner really digs podcasts. He listens to them, recommends them, and even started his own. His Tent Talks are wide-ranging conversations on everything from what psychedelics can tell us about consciousness to truth models in philosophical logic. This past week, Cody had me on the show to talk about my work in poetry and philosophy. I’m grateful to Cody for doing such a close reading of my current work in philosophy of language, on the topic of poetic meaning. Like any piece of writing, I learn just as much about what I have written by talking with someone else about how they interpreted my text.
It’s a long discussion (2:40:25), so here’s a breakdown. The episode opens with general questions about, what he calls, my intellectual history, which I interpret as, how I ended up here. At 36:52, he asks me whether I consider myself to be a poet or philosopher primarily. At 40:44, he then leads us into a close reading and discussion of my claims about the relationship between personal significance and semantic meaning, specifically how poetry blurs the distinction between them. Finally, at 1:30:50, Cody reads some of his favorite poems from my book, What Comes from a Thing, and we talk about the joy and difficulty of writing, reading, and interpreting poetry.
You can also download the episode from iTunes, under Podcasts, here.
Or, you can check out the full range of his podcasts at his website, codyturnercreations.com
This morning, I was one of the featured guests on HuffPost Live for a discussion on gender bias in the death penalty. As you may know the state of Texas was scheduled to execute Kimberly McCarthy today. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, State District Judge Larry Mitchell has issued a stay in McCarthy’s execution. Her new execution date is now April 3, 2013.
Thirteen years ago, I published a paper on gender discrimination in the US death penalty system, which still gets a fair amount of traffic on PhilPapers. I was happy to share the half hour with Elizabeth Rapaport, whose theory on the “domestic discount” I discuss in my article.