SS: What is the role of the philosopher today?

HP: The role of the philosopher has always been to ask us to examine what we take for granted. The philosopher embedded in time will be become dated but this is not something we can worry about. We must do the best we can with the resources at hand. The Greek notion of a philosopher is no longer possible, the notion that the Philosopher's life was the only life worth living. As a way of exploring this issue, one book I frequently recommend to my students is Hadot's Philosophy as a Way of Life.

SS: What is Philosphy?

HP: The two primary concepts include the worldly and the technical. The worldy side is that every human being has a sense of or is able to reflect on the nature of human problems. The technical side is made up of the arguments and the logic used to explore these problems.

SS: I remember I once asked you if you belonged to the analytic school as opposed to the continental school and you had answered that you were trained in the former. That left me with a feeling that there's a more complex explanation in your answer. Is this so?

HP: I don't believe the division between these two schools is relevant. European philosophy is much too diverse to be captured by the idea of a single movement or school called "Continental Philosophy" and likewise "Analytic Philosophy." Usually when Americans speak of continental philosophy they think of three or four major French philosophers and then they class philosophers like Juergen Habermas as "continental," as well even though he totally opposed the so-called "post-modernism." And analytic philosophy comprises so many thinkers who (1) do not believe that philosophy should be concerned to analyze language and (2) that original versions of analytic philosophy(which did think that Philosophy's job is to analyze and clarify language) were totally mistaken that I don't see why the name is still used.

The main negative effect of pretending that analytic philosophy is a "movement," is to tell our students that what we do is good and clear and what continental philosophers do is bad philosophy and nonsense which is not true. I am against the terms not because I am against the two supposed movements with those names but because I deny that there really are two clear-cut movements, and even more because I am sick of the slandering that these terms go with.

SS: What is Pragmatism?

HP: First, let me emphasize that I do not consider myself a pragmatist, although 'Pragmatism' has certainly been an important influence on my work in the last 15 years. I see Pragmatisim has having had one wrong idea and a number of very right ones.

The wrong idea was that they could define truth in terms of "the final opinion" (a notion each of them understood differently, to add to the confusion). By that they sometimes meant what was verified, or what 'worked' both in the sense of leading to successful prediction and being fruitful for further inquiry and sometimes what inquiry (or human opinion) was fated to converge to and sometimes still others.

Among the right ideas I have argued (especially in the chapter of my Words and Life titled "Pragmatism and Moral Objectivity" and in the little book called Pragmatism, An Open Question were the following:

1. Value is not just a topic that concerns one tiny corner of experience, and it is not just a topic that has to do with politics and morals; "value" is a ubiquitous phenomenon and much of our confusion about value and about inquiry in general comes from failing to see this.
2. We must be Fallibilists--that means we must reject the very idea that there is such an intelligible concept as "absolute certainty," either in science or in ethics or anywhere else. But Fallibilism is not skepticism. I have described the idea that one can be simultaneously fallibilistic and anti-skeptical in all areas as Pragmatism's great insight.
3. All inquiry worthy of name(and Pragmatists prefer he term "inquiry," to the more rational sounding "rational thought") is both experimental and social.
4. All knowledge is perspectival. But that does not mean that it is just what one's culture happens to endorse or that genuinely contradictory beliefs can be equally true. It does mean that all knowledge is "interested," [and] reflects interests and values--but these can themselves be criticized.

There are lots of further insights but these four seem essential to me.

SS: What are the books you have authored which you'd like to recommend others to read?
HP: Realism with a Human Face (Harvard University Press), Pragmatism, An Open Question (Blackwell), Renewing Philosophy (Harvard University Press).

SS: Other books?
HP: Philosophy as a Way of Life (Hadot), The Claim of Reason, Stanley Cavell's Pursuits of Happiness, and The Senses of Walden

SS: What's your favorite novel?
HP: George Eliot's Middlemarch. Perhaps Henry James's The Wings of the Dove.

SS: Poets?
HP: Rilke, Auden, Yeats.

SS: What, if any, current novel are you reading now?
HP: The Industry of Souls by Martin Booth.