Summer Reading List 2024

Josh Landy
Can television be… philosophical?

Ray Briggs
What do sequels and prequels tell us about history and science?

Josh Landy
Is sci-fi just philosophy without the answers?

Ray Briggs
Welcome to Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Josh Landy
…except your intelligence. I’m Josh Landy.

Ray Briggs
And I’m Ray Briggs. We’re coming to you from the studios of KALW San Francisco Bay Area.

Josh Landy
Continuing conversations that begin at Philosophers Corner on the Stanford campus, where Ray teaches philosophy, and I direct the philosophy and literature initiative.

Ray Briggs
Today, it’s our annual summer reading list, thought provoking books for thoughtful readers.

Josh Landy
This year. We’ve got a couple of new books on our list that take deep dives into TV, film and popular culture. In just a bit. We’ll talk to Nathaniel Goldberg from Washington and Lee University, co-author of “Revising Reality: How Sequels, Remakes, Retcons, and Rejects Explain the World.”

Ray Briggs
We’ll also ask Sondra Laugier from the University of Paris about her new book, “TV-Philosophy in Action: The Ethics and Politics of TV Series.”

Josh Landy
And we’ll get recommendations for philosophical science fiction from Durham University philosopher and prolific author of her own speculative fiction, Sara Uckelman.

Ray Briggs
So let’s start with those expanded fictional universes, sequels, prequels, reboots and read cons.

Josh Landy
You know, sequels and prequels often get a bad rap, Ray, but every now and again, that’s a real classic like The Godfather II.

The Godfather II
I don’t feel I have to wipe everybody out, Tom—just my enemies.

Ray Briggs
Or Star Wars: Rogue One.

Star Wars: Rogue One
They call it the Death Star. But they have no idea there’s a way to defeat it.

Josh Landy
Or one of my favorites, Mad Max: Fury Road.

Mad Max: Fury Road
We go back. Back. Yeah. I thought you weren’t insane anymore.

Ray Briggs
And isn’t the Odyssey kind of a sequel to the Iliad?

Josh Landy
Oh, that’s a great one. Ray.

Ray Briggs
Okay, but what about reboots and retcons? What exactly is the difference between those?

Josh Landy
Well, both of them change something important in the fictional world. It’s just that the retcon that is a case of retroactive continuity that pretends Yeah, things were always this way from the beginning.

Ray Briggs
So like when Arthur Conan Doyle kills off Sherlock Holmes at Reichenbach falls, and then 10 years later decides that actually, he made a miraculous escape.

Josh Landy
Exactly. That’s a classic case of a retcon. But a reboot is different. A reboot says, Hey, we’re just starting over. We’re not even going to pretend that these two fictional worlds totally hang together.

Ray Briggs
Oh, so that would be like Batman Begins where Christopher Nolan created a totally different version of that character from the one of the other movies and he’s brooding and grim, dark and traumatized, and very fallible.

Batman Begins
Why bats, Master Wayne? Bats frighten me. It’s time my enemies shared my dread.

Ray Briggs
So that’s a reboot.

Josh Landy
Absolutely. That’s a great example. And that means we now have on the table four different ways of expanding fictional universes: sequels, prequels, reboots, and retcons. And our guest, Nathaniel Goldberg thinks they explained the world.

Ray Briggs
In fact, that’s the title of his book, co-authored with Chris Gavaler, “Revising Reality: How Sequels, Remakes, Retcons, and Rejects Explain the World.” We asked Nat how these concepts from fiction and literature apply to reality.

Nathaniel Goldberg
So sequels occur whenever something new is added, like think every time Congress passes a law, it’s one after the other. Think of the 18th Amendment says prohibition can’t if alcohol in the US can’t be sold. 21st says no, but nope. Let’s sequel that decision and say that you can went from being illegal to being legal. So that’s a sequel in the case of law.

Ray Briggs
I want to ask about retcons in the case of law. So you find some places in the legal canon where people are using the word retcon to talk about law, and they kind of disagree about whether this is is a good or a bad thing? Like why might I be okay with lobbying? retconned?

Nathaniel Goldberg
Sure, so legislatures don’t themselves retcon it’s not like alcohol use was always allowed in the US. And we just mistakenly thought that the amendment said it wasn’t. But judicial decisions acts of law courts, especially the Supreme Court. That’s where retconning happens. So the very recent case, the recent dobs decision, overturning Roe v. Wade, doesn’t say that abortion was protected in the past. And now it’s not. The actual wording of the jobs decision says that abortion was never a protected right. It is making retroactively clear that Roe v Wade was decided incorrectly. This

Josh Landy
was the one that really leapt out at me and screamed, yeah, these categories really do apply. That is to say, these categories from the world of fiction, thinking about successive works of fiction as sequels, prequels, reboots, retcons, really does seem to apply to the world of law. I was thinking, look, you’ve got these originalists in the United States, who are basically ret Connors, right? They’re saying, we’re not changing the law. We’re just showing you what was there all along, even if in some cases, maybe it’s not entirely true. You’ve got some progressive true, presumably calling for a reboot. Maybe we should ditch this particular constitution or some parts of it at least and, and start again, I’m not saying all progressives. And then presumably you got some incrementalist who likes sequels? It’s well, the laws, you know, the Constitution is pretty good. But maybe we need an amendment or two, just to kind of update things for the present day. Does that sort of landscape seem about right to you?

Nathaniel Goldberg
It does, with the exception of the reboot or remake point. Because for that kind of revision, you really are starting over and projecting a different kind of story to begin with. Like we’d have a whole new country or a whole new constitution. And even in that case, that may not actually be a reboot. Because reboots are like starting a new Batman series. You can’t do that. In reality, you can really only do that in fiction. So

Ray Briggs
I want to move now to history, because that’s a place where somebody might be more worried particularly about Rhett Khan’s. So sure a law is human made. And we can reinterpret it. But history like that just stuff happened or it didn’t. Does it make sense to retcon? History?

Nathaniel Goldberg
Right? That’s a great question. So the word history is actually ambiguous. It can mean either past events, which we can’t change, because we can’t change the past. Or it could mean what we have to say about those past events, like a history book isn’t past events. It’s a story of past events. So nobodies at least, I’m not saying that we’re ever going to change past events, but we can reinterpret our understanding of them. So I can give a quick example that made some news in higher ed, a bunch of years ago, the New York Times published something called this 660 19 project that reinterpreted and I want to say retcon US history by saying that the pivotal moment was the introduction of Africans as slaves in Virginia in 1619. And that reinterpretation got a lot of people upset and a lot of other people really interested. So that’s a kind of retconning of history, not the events, but our understanding of the events.

Ray Briggs
So in both the fiction case and the history case, I’m kind of curious about whether there’s a right answer. With history, I’m more tempted to think look, there’s one thing that’s if I can borrow a term from literature, Canon. And for like, actual Star Wars universe, I don’t know, there’s a lot of canons, would you agree with that distinction? Or do you think it’s more complicated than that?

Nathaniel Goldberg
Oh, that’s easy. I think whenever you ask a philosopher a question, do you agree or think it’s more complicated? Obviously, I think it’s more complicated. But I hear you, there’s something to what you’re saying. But I do, in all seriousness, think that it is a little bit more complicated. Because the way that we write stories, at least, there’s a conceit to fiction that authors themselves may not fully know, the implications that their stories and that suggests that even if it is ultimately fiction, that is something created, there still might be facts about it that are not known by the particular reader, even even the writer. So in that thin sort of sense, we can still discover things about stories that are fictional, but I hear you not in the robust kind of way that we can about history or science. So lots of the examples in the book draw from science as well. And when we discover a new planet say that’s usually a sequel discovery, because we’re just adding to what we discovered before. But if we decided that, you know, this whole time we thought planets circled the Earth, but they actually circled the sun. That’s a reinterpretation. That is a retcon of our understanding. Planets always circle the sun. We just didn’t realize it.

Josh Landy
Nat, I have a question about canon versus fanfiction. And this is a question a little bit about fiction, but a little bit about history just in the spirit of your book revising reality. So what I think I’ve noticed there are two kinds of people in the world. There’s the kind that really wants there to be cannon. So, you know, they really care whether such and such a detail in Star Wars is sort of legitimated by the authors or something like that. And then there’s the kind that doesn’t really care. And in fact, we might very well prefer a work of fanfiction that isn’t, quote unquote, Canon. On the side of history, you’ve got people who really liked the idea that, you know, there’s a set of facts, and we can get to those facts. Maybe there’s even ultimately, one best explanation and best interpretation and best answer to the question of how did the Civil War start when, when was America really begun and things like that. And on the other side, you’ve got, you know, they’ve got the post modernists who love the idea that we will never have such a thing. And that’s, and we can revel in all these different stories. I wonder how we can somehow adjudicate? Well, first of all, are those two things aligned? According to you? Do you think it’s the same kind of person who loves reveling in many different versions of history? And who loves reveling in many different fanfictions? Or is there a kind of psychological similarity between the, you know, the kind of person who gravitates a certain kind of history, and the kind of person who gravitates a certain kind of picture of cannon versus fanfiction?

Nathaniel Goldberg
I mean, there might be if history is meant in the sense of understanding or interpretation. So I recently taught a course on philosophy of history. And there are those who think that history is basically like novel writing just a bunch of stories that somehow triangulate the facts, whatever that is. But then history in the sense of the facts, whatever they are, that’s going to be fixed. So Josh, if you’re asking people who like fan fiction versus people who like alternative histories, if you mean alternative, or different histories in the sense of different facts, then no, those are, those are different, because the facts are the facts. But if you mean people who like reading different history books about the same event, then maybe that is a kind of loosening of the Canon because they’re trying to get different perspectives on the same thing. But in the reality case, the history case, the same thing are going to be the fixed facts. Yeah, the Magna Carta really was signed in 1215. Whether or not we interpreted as a good thing or a bad thing for democracy. Yes.

Josh Landy
Okay. But I have to confess, I’m on the I’m on the Canon side. And I’m not quite sure why in the case of fiction, but I feel like I want even the world of fiction, to push back against me to resist me, right? So I can’t just make Star Wars be whatever it is, like, I can’t make Luke Skywalker be 97 feet tall. Because the even the fictional world pushes back against me. And there’s something salutary about the resistance in the same way as the real world pushes back upon me, I can’t make the Magna Carta have been signed in 2024. So what’s going on in inside my brain psychoanalyze me? Sure.

Nathaniel Goldberg
So maybe this is a place where the distinction between remakes and the other kinds of revisions come in. So we can say, depending upon our theory of literature, which I’m I don’t have, you know, I don’t have a fictional or factual dog in that race. But some people think that the meaning of literature is based on the author’s intent, and other people think it’s based on reader response. However, we think it’s fixed, maybe some people think it’s not really fixed, let’s suppose it is. If it is fixed in some way, then sure we could have a different story, we could remake the story of Luke Skywalker where he is 97 feet tall, but that’s going to be a different Luke Skywalker, just like every time there’s a new Batman and Solomon sometimes Robins with him sometimes his parents are killed in the cave with or he’s in the cave with the boat, whatever the story is. They’re minor variations, but we understand them that it’s not actually the same Batman, because you know, one Batman had some events happen to him and another Batman or another. So we can if I’m being psychoanalytic, maybe say Josh, that maybe you do like the idea of remakes just starting over and giving different versions. Whereas if you think that there is something fixed in fiction, and I guess like you I’m on the Canon side as well, then we’re just going to say every time there’s a remake, you’re no longer in the canon.

Ray Briggs
So I want to push back a little bit from the side of people who love fanfiction both because I think like there’s better and worse fanfiction, right, like it’s not all on a par. And I think like okay, There are some things that your history has to respect, like the facts. And there are some things that your science has to respect, like the empirical observations. But there are a lot of different interpretations that are good, that are compatible with those facts like which ones are relevant, you just can’t pick out a large enough set to pick out everything relevant, so which ones you’re gonna focus on? And then for scientific theories, you know, we can have lots of empirically adequate scientific theories and maybe one is good for one purpose, and maybe one isn’t good for another purpose. It doesn’t mean everything is on a par. So I just, I just wanted to defend the fanfic against the insistence on a single cannon.

Josh Landy
And some fanfic becomes canon, right? That’s how good it is.

Ray Briggs
I’m just thinking about 50 Shades of Grey… Nat, it’s our summer reading show. And for our last question, we’d like you to share with us a favorite work of fiction, that reimagines something prior either as a sequel or a reboot, or a retcon. What’s what’s your favorite work of fiction in that category? Sure.

Nathaniel Goldberg
So maybe my favorite retcon is in the original version of The Hobbit by JRR. Tolkien Gollum is described as a happy go lucky, slimy sort of creature, but all around good guy who gives Bilbo this magic ring. And then I think we, those of us who’ve read the books and seeing the movies know that in Lord of the Rings, and then a later version of The Hobbit, Gollum is described as an evil kind of creature. And it turns out, that Bilbo lied about how he got the ring on the lying version. That’s a retcon. Tolkien is basically saying that we thought that Bilbo told the truth that got the ring from this happy go lucky creature. But really, he took it in a way stole it. So that’s my favorite retcon. And in the world of film, we learned in the Star Wars sequel trilogy, that this character named Ray is a nobody. She’s just abandoned on some planet. But then we learn in a later movie that actually all along the skits retcon, she was a Palpatine descended from like the granddaughter of the Emperor.

Josh Landy
I’m one of the people who was a little irked by what JJ Abrams did to Rian Johnson’s—

Nathaniel Goldberg
So there’s a case where I think we’re more than justified in rejecting the sequel.

Ray Briggs
Nat, thank you so much for joining us.

Nathaniel Goldberg
Thank you, both of you for your time. This has been loads of fun.

Ray Briggs
Nathaniel Goldberg from Washington and Lee University, co-author of “revising reality, how sequels, remakes, read cons and rejects explain the world.”

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. And today we’re putting together our annual summer reading list.

Ray Briggs
Coming up: philosophical questions raised by your favorite TV shows, plus suggestions for summer sci fi, when Philosophy Talk continues.

Josh Landy
This is Philosophy Talk. And it’s our annual summer reading list. I’m Josh Landy, here with my Stanford colleague Ray Briggs.

Ray Briggs
All that talk about prequels, sequels and reboots makes me want to watch some smart philosophical television.

Josh Landy
Okay, but what does it mean for television to be philosophical?

Ray Briggs
Let’s ask Sondra Laugier She is professor of philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris and author of the recent book, “TV philosophy in action: the ethics and politics of TV series.”

Josh Landy
We asked her what kinds of insight you can get by turning your philosophical attention to television.

Sandra Laugier
television, it’s a very interesting phenomena. Because when you watch TV show for like maybe 15 years, like ER, for example, or even five years, like six feet under give two examples. Actually, it becomes really part of the main events, some of the main events of your life like memories of your own life, and you get attached to characters. And you kind of know them as if they are real. So it’s something that what we would call an ontological question about the reality of these characters because they are fictional, but they are really there. So I’m very interested in that. And also, and this is why the title is the ethics and politics of TV shows the fact that they have such an ethical importance and this shows are really providing a moral education to their viewers, just as Hollywood movies in the last century. Now, political and moral education comes from this shows.

Josh Landy
So one example he talks about, it’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And you connect that to care ethics, which is something you’ve written about separately. Can you tell us a little bit about about care ethics and how it shows up in Buffy the Vampire Slayer,

Sandra Laugier
I tell ya, Buffy is really one of my favorite shows, it’s so powerful, because you have this character, which is this kind of, you know, supernatural, very strong, young woman. And so I was interested, of course, in the fact that the show was educating its audience about woman and feminism. But also, Buffy is not only a superhero, but she’s also a very caring, she has, she’s not isolated, like other, you know, killers slayers, but she has this family she cares about and also her friends. And so the group is very important here. And this is true for so many shows the fact that it’s not only about one individual, usually male, and so on, but it’s really about groups and families very often. So this topic of care is central to many TV shows, like for example, er that I mentioned, it’s really also about care, and many, many reasons, good shows like this is our saw that I mean, they are really representing care. And I found it very interesting also that, you know, during the pandemic, you had so many series, that people went back to the the series because it was representing care, but also because, you know, it was taking care of the TV shows were taking care of their audience.

Ray Briggs
So this is a way in which like TV can be good for us, like it can give us a good moral education. Is there also a risk that TV might give people a bad moral education, if you put the wrong things on it?

Sandra Laugier
This is a very important question. And I hear that a lot. Of course, you can be reluctant. And you can also dismiss TV shows, but for me, there are no good TV shows that are bad for you. I mean, there are bad TV shows, and I don’t want to talk about that. But you know, if you’re an if you have a very main character, like, you know, Tony Soprano, or even, you know, characters in madman in a minute, it’s, of course, you have some very, you know, morally contemptible characters, but they are also very interesting for you to watch. And they can be a source of more education for you. Like, you know, the best TV show, maybe it’s Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. And it’s all about ethics. Of course, it’s really about the ethics you can get from this flower, the characters in this attic, our ambition is really there, because so many titles of TV shows have good and bad news, like The Good Wife, the good plays Better Call Saul, Saul Goodman. I mean, this is really this whole rhetoric of ethics, that actually is really about how you get better by meeting this bed of flawed people.

Josh Landy
I mean, that’s cheerful. But we know of some cases where it didn’t go that way. So Fight Club, which is one of my favorite films, which I do not think is an immoral film. A lot of people watch that film. And think, yeah, that’s, that’s what I want to be like that there was an individual actually blew up a Starbucks after watching Fight Club 24, which I know is one of your favorites. That show was criticized, I think, reasonably, for presenting torture as a reasonable strategy in situations where there’s time pressure, the so called ticking time bomb scenario. And that, of course, was at the height of the post 911 Patriot Act sort of moment in the United States. Seems like, shouldn’t we be worried as Ray saying that in some cases, these even good shows, because they’re morally complicated? The best shows are not simple morality tales, I hope. And so if they’re going to be complicated, isn’t there a risk that, you know, well, we could say there’s a risk things go right. We could also say, correspondingly, there’s an opportunity for other things to happen than just moral education.

Sandra Laugier
I agree that there is a risk, but as you say, you know, these good shows that complex and it’s the complexity instead of the fact that they can be of course used in a bad way that you know, make the quality two and the fact that you, yourself, you both I can see the risk and that and see the complexity, it means that actually someone who is watching country for this is my hope to swim always to cheer for my hope is that the show educates you to understand that there is something may be wrong, not in in it also. And it’s an ambivalence toward this. And I think this is what is interesting is that this education makes the viewer able to decide, because there is this kind of experience and this empowerment of her own experience by seeing a show. And I think it’s really also about exploring a specific zone, you know, if you see only 24, then probably, you will end up having a stupid idea. Although, you know, in 24, you have some very nice Muslim characters, you have a black president, I mean, you have many nice things too. But anyway, when you see only 24, but you might have the wrong idea. But if you see 24, but also homeland, but also to home, but also the behold the strength show, which is great, then you have a whole picture of what can be done this in a show about security and terrorism.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today, it’s our annual summer reading special. And we’re talking to Sandra Laugier from the Sorbonne in Paris, author of “TV philosophy in action: the ethics and politics of TV series.”

Ray Briggs
I think I was still a little worried. I kind of have similar words, actually about Mad Men. I didn’t like 24. But I really did like Mad Men. And I thought this is kind of glamorizing this 1950s culture of like men getting drunk in their offices and hitting on their secretary isn’t like, gosh, John, John Hamm looks great doing it. But I kind of I both am enjoying this. And I’m not sure about the moral education so that this is a case where like, I think it’s a statically. Good show. But like, I’m not even sure about the moral education I’m getting. That’s not really why I’m there. So you think my qualms or misplace?

Sandra Laugier
No, not at all, actually. But Jon Hamm is great. And he’s still great. I mean, you’ve seen in Fargo, and he still has this team, persona, a bit. Madman was aesthetically really, you know, kind of ideal. And I agree that it presents a reality. But you know, it’s really about you tomorrow, general question about how can we deal with press representations of a past reality that we don’t like anymore, but I think for me, but maybe it’s very French to say so, for me, it’s very educational, to see works of art that represents something we disagree on. And this is what actually they are here. Also, for. So it’s good that someone sees these cells, but as you say, of course, not as a reality we have to aspire to, but something we are now able to criticize and distance as from but also to understand what was attractive about this way of life, aesthetically, but even morally.

Josh Landy
So it seems like there are two possibilities in play here. Right? So one possibility, and I have to confess, it’s the one I like better is the one you in your book you call democratic. So that’s the possibility we’ve just been talking about, which is that really great shows are morally complicated. And our task is to sort of figure out what we think. And that itself is beneficial for us in terms of, you know, sharpening our moral tools and, and expanding moral imagination. The other possibility is, that was what we were talking about earlier, where a TV show teaches us educates us and you talk about shows having lessons and shows educating and learning value and so on. And so Buffy is supposed to teach us to be better people. Which one do you like better?

Sandra Laugier
Actually, I think both are really in the same task. When I talk about education, it’s not only about you know, teaching and feeding you with some lessons and thinks you should do because actually, even Buffy doesn’t tell you what to—

Josh Landy
It tells you how to fight vampires!

Sandra Laugier
Yeah, but you know how to live and so answer. So you know, it’s often I talk about education and here uh, yeah, and I’m really influenced by Stanley Cavell, who has himself influenced by Ralph Waldo Emerson, which is you know, your great American thinker who really thinks that Education is really just about giving you the strength and the autonomy and self reliance independence to make your own judgment. And for me, this is what watching lots of TV, not only one show offers you the fact that you get used enough to sharp then you are able to really have your own judgment to so you have somehow to educate yourself. So this is a very important part of philosophy and of moral perfectionism, as I said, my son would say.

Ray Briggs
I have what might be like a peculiarly American question, which is about representation, and about representation of like different kinds and identities of people, I think this is something that Americans are super focused on. Do you think that the makers of television shows have a responsibility to achieve any kind of demographic representation? And that they can sort of do well or badly at it? Or do you think that that’s not not a going concern?

Sandra Laugier
Actually, it has always been the main concern of TV, you know, this is why also many people dismiss TV or underestimated because TV shows and really needed to, you know, have a wider audience and have everyone represented, you know, if you’re a black person, you can see a white person representing you, maybe for one hour, but for eight seasons, maybe you don’t like that. So it’s very, it has been very important for TV, to have minorities to have a woman. So I think the fact that, you know, you need to have a wider audience for a TV show has been a strength for me, compared to what I see, this time, maybe the French way, is a very male dominated white, you know, film, industry. And TV, of course, it’s not perfect, and minorities have not been represented enough, but you have always seen much more woman, much more non white people, old woman, for example, you see them on TV shows.

Ray Briggs
The Golden Girls—friendships between old women.

Josh Landy
Andof course, you know, we think of Buffy who’s maybe the, you know, the aura protagonist here, at least in in your book. And what you say about vampire fiction is so beautiful. That vampire fiction is about a lot of different things. But one of the things it’s about is mutability. Can you say a little bit about that? Like, how is how does vampire fiction capture the mutability of human life?

Sandra Laugier
It’s so strange, actually, that this vampire fiction has been so so huge. So I had no no, not only buffet, but this whole, you know, to be true was so, so important and, and has really, given some very creative fiction on TV. So so it’s a real question that for me, it really takes us back to the basic philosophical question of what this shows about. And these vampire fiction, they really show what it is to change, because you see the characters changing. And you see this kind of metaphorical representation of sexuality by this physical change that another change, you know, you can see some changes you couldn’t really see on screen, but you have changed as like, you know, this kind of physical transformation. But also, it’s really about what is it to change, when you are growing up, and you’re a teenager, and when you have this kind of body that somehow is mysterious. And also, it’s really also about what it is to be the difference between, you know, dead or alive, and what it is to feel to feel alive because all these vampire of God, they are dead. But what this shows, presenting us is, you know, the desire and the fact to be alive to have a life even when you are dead. And I think it’s something that is not easy to represent.

Ray Briggs
So I have to ask, Do you have a favorite TV show or movie other than Buffy, because we’ve already covered Buffy that you’d like to recommend to our listeners and a reason why.

Sandra Laugier
Yeah, I like Buffy that’s, that’s for sure. But it’s not generally show. I like I always promoted because many people don’t take it seriously. But I’m also a very conventional person. And I like TV shows that everyone likes I like the wire for me. David Simon, is really a show for me that is very powerful because it has this you know, descriptive sociological ambition, but also that has this are these minorities that are present. And I also think it’s important and also this moral issue. shields that are so powerful. So of course I love the wire and if I am allowed to Yeah, to, of course I also love as I said Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul because they are very powerful shows. And also because they really kind of represent what this medium can do at best because you know, sometimes you have very good TV show, but it’s peculiar like buffets specific. And I go back to cover and about film studies and TV studies, you know, work of art has to somehow represent what you expect from the Java and familia men Breaking Bad and better call so I really some kind of idea of what you can do with a TV show.

Josh Landy
Sandra, thank you so much for joining us today.

Sandra Laugier
Thank you so much and pardon my English.

Ray Briggs
Sandra Laugier from the University of Paris, author of “TV philosophy in action: the ethics and politics of TV series.”

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk, and today we’re compiling our annual summer reading list.

Ray Briggs
Coming up: science fiction suggestions from Sarah Uckelman—philosopher of language by day, writer of speculative fiction by nigh—when Philosophy Talk continues.

Josh Landy
It’s our annual summer reading list. I’m Josh Landy. And this is Philosophy Talk, a program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs, we’re talking about thought provoking books for thoughtful summer reading.

Josh Landy
Yeah, something I love reading in the summer is science fiction. It’s full of philosophical thought experiments.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, but don’t you get frustrated that it has more questions in it than answers?

Josh Landy
Au contraire, that’s what I love about it. I think the writers design their stories that way on purpose.

Ray Briggs
Let’s ask one of them. Sara Uckelman is professor of philosophy at Durham University in the UK. But she’s also a prolific writer of speculative fiction. She told us how her philosophical work and her creative work fit together.

Sara Uckelman
What I have discovered in the last decade or so of writing lots of logic writing lots of fiction is that it really is just two sides of the same coin. All of the things that I need to engage with logical structures to write a good logical paper to get the reader invested in whatever niche problem I’m interested in. These are exactly the same skills that I need to tell an engaging story to get characters that a reader is involved in to put them into problems and difficulties that the reader wants to see them get out at.

Josh Landy
So Sarah, could you give us an example of a story that you’ve written that you think is interestingly philosophical and say, just a little bit about the philosophical questions that story races? Are?

Sara Uckelman
It’s something I wrote a while ago now, but it’s still one of my favorites. It’s called the platform between heaven and earth. And a lot of my stories start from what questions and the what question? In this case stemmed from a comment that a friend made he misspoke. And he said language was made for us to miscommunicate with each other.

Ray Briggs
Is that possible?

Sara Uckelman
Well, as soon as you hear something like this, what does it make you think of?

Ray Briggs
The Tower of Babel.

Sara Uckelman
Bingo! I wanted to write a tower of Babel story. And that’s actually where the title comes from the one of the historical ziggurats that is sometimes kind of pointed to as being that historical Tower of Babel, Its name translates as the platform between heaven and earth.

Ray Briggs
So what happens with the Tower of Babel in your story?

Sara Uckelman
I started doing a bunch of research into kind of the traditional Tower of Babel stories, because I wanted to tell one of them, but not the one that everybody knows. What’s the Tower of Babel story that you know?

Ray Briggs
The one that I’ve heard, is that human beings wanted to rival God. And so they built a tower that was so tall, it reached into the heavens and God got mad at them and made them speak a bunch of different languages, so they could not communicate as well. So they couldn’t engineer such awesome towers in the future.

Sara Uckelman
Right, you heard the punishment story. This is the Christian version, unsurprising. They took a story that had already been in kind of ancient circulation, and added on vengeance and punishments and hubris and pride. These are not actually aspects of the original versions of the story. So this led me to a particular question which I wanted to explore which was how come Would you tell a tower of Babel story where the gods confusing everybody’s language was not as a punishment, but as sort of a transformative step to allow them a greater level of communication or understanding that they didn’t have before.

Josh Landy
Okay, that sounds paradoxical. So what, how is it to our benefit communication only that languages don’t communicate or that there’s something flawed with languages.

Sara Uckelman
The idea was, if humans can all talk with each other, it doesn’t mean that we can still talk to the divine in the same sort of way. And sort of the premise of the story is that everybody has been praying to the gods, but the gods had never responded. But from the Gods point of view, it’s like they’ve been trying to talk to these people. But nobody has been listening, because nobody has been taught to listen to a language or form of communication that they don’t already understand.

Ray Briggs
This is a kind of really neat, I don’t know, take on noisy communication, and maybe difficult communication. I love it. I want to ask about other stories you’ve written. So do you have another favorite to tell us about?

Sara Uckelman
I’ve got one, which is kind of straight out of the philosophical thought experiment literature. Are you familiar with the Grandfather Paradox?

Josh Landy
Okay, so there’s this the whole Back to the Future thing. If you if you were able to travel back in time, you might inadvertently end the life of your grandfather and thus, eliminate your own self in the future. And some people take that to be a proof that time travel isn’t possible. Is that Is that the kind of space that we’re talking about here?

Sara Uckelman
Yeah, just the idea that someone goes back in time and messes something up, everything gets problematic, ergo time travel can happen. And it struck me after I had worked through with some of my philosophy students about this paradox and related ones that it’s always the men going back and screwing everything up. Surely, if the women were the ones who were in charge, this wouldn’t happen. And so I wrote the grandmother paradox, which is just a simple time travel story, where it’s a woman, she goes back in time, visits her younger self, and they fix something rather than destroying it.

Ray Briggs
That’s, that’s beautiful. I mean, isn’t it just as paradoxical for the time travel, though? If I noticed something is bad now, and I go back in the past to make it never have happened. And it was my motivation for going back in the past, what explains why I left in the time machine in the first place?

Sara Uckelman
You still get the paradox. But the brilliant thing about stories as opposed to like, philosophy, argument papers, is I don’t have to solve it. I just have to tell you a good story about it.

Josh Landy
That is very well said that is one of the great beauties of literature, not only do you not have to answer the questions, but it can be a great boon, you know, tell the story, for the reading experience, is that something that you’ve discovered, in your interactions with readers that it sort of adds something to the success and the effect and the impact of a story that you leave things a little bit open? A little bit? So they sort of Norway at readers? Is that is that is that a kind of interaction, you’ve had a kind of feedback you’ve had about your stories.

Sara Uckelman
I’m not sure specifically about my own stories, but certainly kind of about good stories. In general, the ones that are satisfied are the ones that require reader input. And this might be in the form of grappling with these unresolved questions trying to figure out, like, do I find this a problem? Do I think this is a paradox? Does it all make sense to me, but also, even at the level of just a good story is one where the reader has to make a bunch of inference. So you don’t say everything, you let the reader fill in all the gaps, because then everybody’s gonna fill them in in a slightly different way. And so you get a very rich sort of story experience that way.

Ray Briggs
So this kind of moves us nicely from thinking about you as a writer of stories to thinking of you as a reader of stories. Do you have any stories or books to recommend for our listeners for their summer reading?

Sara Uckelman
Absolutely. If you like time travel stories that kind of flirt with the paradox, but don’t necessarily try to resolve it. Natasha pullies novel The kingdom’s was one of the best things that I have read in recent years. I inhaled it in about two or three days. I waited a day and then I read it again. Highly recommended.

Josh Landy
Okay, can you tell us in a nutshell what’s going on in there?

Sara Uckelman
There’s time travel. And no, I can’t. without ruining it.

Josh Landy
Okay, yeah, great. No spoilers, but Okay, so maybe I’ll ask you a different question. What philosophical issues are raised by this novel?

Sara Uckelman
It’s got some really interesting kind of oblique considerations of personal identity. And when one person is the same, either because they’ve gone back in time, or, or even because of more simple questions, such as memory, when you lose a certain portion of your memory, how does this affect who you are as a person? Are you still the same person as this essentially other person who has all of these experiences and all the memories and all of these friends and relationships that you don’t have access to anymore.

Ray Briggs
That’s a great question, both for time travel stories and in general. I think one of one of my favorite things about speculative fiction is the way that it gives you sort of more dramatic versions of puzzles that we all face in everyday life. Like I think anybody who’s had an older relative with dementia, probably has had to worry about this.

Sara Uckelman
The the other one that I have to give a shout out to because it was one that I went back to my logic students and said, if you need some are reading, read this book, avoid it. All right, Quan, Babel. Babel story. Yes, it is about language, it is about translation, it is about questions of access and exclusion, about colonization and colonialism. It’s set in like 1830s, Oxford, and yet the, like, the periods of strike action, were mirroring the strike action at universities that I was involved in at the time I was reading the book. So it was just this kind of em, all these little threads came together to create this wonderful, wonderful experience.

Josh Landy
So it sounds like it’s got a it’s raising certain historical and political questions. But also, by the sound of it, a set of philosophical questions about language, I take it I mean, does it does it hook up to what we were saying before does, it hooks up to questions of, for example, the relationship between language and thought how much somebody’s you know, the language that somebody is brought up to speak affects the way that they think.

Sara Uckelman
Yes, in quite a literal sort of way. So the premise of the magical system in Cohen’s book is that there is no direct translation of words from one language to another, there’s always going to be kind of bits on the edges that aren’t captured. And you can then use translation as a means of essentially, those bits that are leftover. That’s where you get your magical power. And so you want to find as close to translation matches you can get kind of be the strongest Mac. But sometimes you might have a concept in one language that is just untranslatable. Or you can say lots of things around it, but it never quite grasped that. And so it really forces you as a reader to kind of face well, what are the parts of my own language that I can’t translate into someone else’s language? Or that can’t be translated into my language? And what do we lose? Or what can we gain when we can’t say these things? Yeah, I like I like language and questions about what we can and cannot say.

Josh Landy
So Sara, you know, I’ve really enjoyed this conversation today, some of my favorite works of fiction fall into this category of philosophical sci fi: Ursula Le Guin, you’d session, Kurt Vonnegut, Ted Chiang—so much wonderful stuff out there, and of course, your own fantastic stories. Do you have any advice for people who want to get started writing stories like this or writing novels or screenplays? In this domain of philosophical, speculative fiction?

Sara Uckelman
Oh, do I have advice! The first thing is, if you’ve never done anything like this before, don’t start with the novel novels or big complex structures. And just as you wouldn’t sit down and start by writing a philosophy book, don’t aim to write a philosophy novel, go through the short things, the short story, the journal paper, or the flash fiction or the analysis article or the dribble. Yes, or the drabble. It’s exactly 100 words. So it requires the ability to kind of get a single idea into a very small space. And that is actually the advice that I give when I am trying to convince philos have heard that they should think about writing fiction as a philosophical methodology. I always end with a challenge to take a philosophical prompt and write 100 word story on it. They’re great because they don’t take very much time, you can do five or six of them. And if none of them are any good, you’ve only spent half an hour. x

Josh Landy
Ursula Leguin really good advice. And also like your advice from earlier to keep things a little bit open invite reader input. That all sounds like a great recipe for some really cool fiction. Thank you so much for joining us today for all your great suggestions.

Sara Uckelman
Thank you again for having me. It’s always fun to talk about things that I’m writing things that I’m reading and hopefully share the excitement with other people.

Ray Briggs
Sara Uckelman from Durham University with her suggestions for philosophical science fiction reading this summer.

Josh Landy
You can find all the books we’ve talked about on today’s show, along with other recommendations from listeners over to our website, philosophytalk.org.

Ray Briggs
Philosophy Talk is a presentation of KALW local public radio San Francisco Bay Area, and the trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University. Copyright 2024.

Josh Landy
Our executive producer is Ben Trefny.

Ray Briggs
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Josh Landy
Thanks also to Pedro Jimenez, Merle Kessler and Angela Johnston.

Ray Briggs
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Josh Landy
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Ray Briggs
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Josh Landy
Not even when they’re true and reasonable. The conversation continues on our website, philosophytalk.org, where you can become a subscriber and explore our library of nearly 600 episodes. I’m Josh Landy.

Ray Briggs
And I’m Ray Briggs. Thank you for listening.

Josh Landy
And thank you for thinking.