An Interview with Dr. Thi Nguyen
humans will lose out on the thing of greater importance: to be involved in the creative process for ourselves.
Diotima: How often does your work in ethics overlap with aesthetics and vice versa? Are you an autonomist in the sense that ethical merits/flaws do not count against aesthetic merits/flaws?
Nguyen: I am currently seeing this really interesting collision between my work in social epistemology and my work in aesthetics. Like I’ve become really interested in what sustains this dogmatic, narrow-minded mindset, and the possibility that the real antidotes are in aesthetic life, in play. What the world seems to want out of us right now is to hunker down and burn our lives out being maximally productive. But aesthetics, play, ask us to do something else – not to be maximally productive, but to look for the joy of looking itself, to be creative for the satisfactions of the process of creativity.
Diotima: I noticed that your greater philosophical explorations often come from examples relevant to daily/personal life. Where does this tendency arise from?
Nguyen: I don’t know! I guess I want to flip the question: how did so many philosophers get stuck doing philosophy on things that were irrelevant to their daily lives, that were disconnected from their per sonal interests? Why wouldn’t we want to reflect on why the hell we were doing the specific things we were doing? Diotima: Question based on "Eco-Chambers and Epistemic Bubbles": Do you believe that epistemic bubbles are overstimulating to the human mind and in turn cause people to not critically think about what they read? For instance, so many (biased) facts are available to us, do you think it is ruining the quality of information? Nguyen: Yeah, the big worry about both echo chambers and epistemic bubbles is that they’ll narrow your exposure to a wide range of ideas. I don’t think they’re overstimulating – the real problem is that they’re under stimulating . Mill’s way of putting it was that if you aren’t constantly having to defend your views, then your views deaden – you just hold them out of habit, instead of understanding them and revising them in light of the world.
Volume VI (2023)
64
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