Meghan Sullivan is the Wilsey Family College Chair in Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, director of the God and the Good Life Program, and director of the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study. She has published works in many leading philosophy journals. Her first book, Time Biases, was published by Oxford University Press. Her most recent book — The Good Life Method (with Paul Blaschko) — is out with Penguin on January 4, 2021. Her work has been supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the John Templeton Foundation. Sullivan has degrees from the University of Virginia, Oxford University, and Rutgers University, where she earned a PhD in philosophy. She studied at Balliol College, Oxford University, as a Rhodes Scholar. The Good Life method is a winning guide to tackling the big questions of being human with the wisdom of the ages. 

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TRANSCRIPT 

[00:03:52] Sean: Meghan Sullivan, welcome to What Got You There. How are you doing today?

[00:03:55] Meghan Sullivan: I’m doing great, Sean. It’s the week before Thanksgiving, if you work at a university, this is the week when everything explodes. We’re at that phase, but otherwise, I’m doing great.

Exceptional Philosophy Students

[00:04:06] Sean: It’s so funny, I was thinking of the timing of this and it was like, oh wow, Meghan is going to be incredibly busy, so I do appreciate this. And speaking about what you do in terms of academia, I know you’ve worked with thousands and thousands of students and I’m really intrigued about the learning process of the students who engage most deeply with your work. Whether this is the arts, music, whatever it is, I think the best learners engage in a different way. I’m wondering what you’ve seen out of the let’s just call them exceptional students that not only grasp the concepts but integrate those lessons in their life. 

[00:04:44] Meghan Sullivan: I have noticed a couple of surprising features of really excellent philosophy students. Your stereotype of a great philosophy student is somebody that can read a book every single night, smokes clove cigarettes, writes essays that nobody understands, and has a GRE level of vocabulary. That is a stereotype of a philosophy student, but those are not typically the very best students in my class. The very best learners that I see in this, and this is true of freshmen in college. It’s also true of graduate students. First, they are very curious. 

Every time they start to get an answer to a question, it just generates like four more questions for them. They might set out to wonder how many different arguments are there for being a vegan. And they’re genuinely curious about that question and they’ll start listing all of them out. And as they look at the arguments, that’ll prompt them to ask even bigger questions like what is human nature. They’ll ask the question, and they won’t be afraid about how big it is. They’ll just keep writing and going down through their questions. Rather than what a lot of excellent college students do, but it’s bad for philosophy, they really want to please me, or they really want to know what I think is the right answer, the smartest answer is.

I spent a lot of time trying to tell students that I might have strong views about what the right answer is, but to be really great at philosophy, it has to come from them and it has to be their authentic way of investigating the topics. So I think that’s one feature they’re really curious. And the other thing I really look for in students is kindness and engagement with other students. And again, this isn’t just because it makes the classroom a lot happier when people are friends with each other, though, it definitely does. 

But for philosophy, in particular, the way we do philosophy is in dialogue. The really great philosophical masterpieces, like Plato, Aristotle, Kierkegaard, they’re all philosophers talking with other people who might disagree with them, who see things a little bit differently, who they want to convince. I really like students who realize that they’re going to be learning philosophy with other people who are curious about their own questions and who require kindness and engagement. And that also kind of cuts against the stereotype of a philosopher as somebody who kind of sits in their armchair quietly speculating by themselves rather than being really social, being involved, and being in the mix with other people.

Meghan Sullivan Navigating the Different Views

[00:07:16] Sean: Going a little bit further on dialogue, you mentioned a few things there, like being able to grasp, disconfirming evidence or views that are going to challenge yours. I’m just wondering, especially in the classroom context, how you’re able to navigate all of those different views and then allow good dialogue to come through.

[00:07:33] Meghan Sullivan: Sean, it’s not the easiest thing in the universe right now to convince really smart people, to have conversations with people who really disagree with them. It is the hardest thing in the universe right now. It helps me quite a bit to actually read the ancient Greeks like 2,400 years ago in Athens, they were having the same problems as we’re having. People really were suspicious about whether their democracy was still working or suspicious that everybody that they were trying to have a conversation with always has an ulterior motive or is trying to gain power over them.

That dynamic certainly exists in our country and it definitely exists in classrooms. I think first we have to realize that having a really good dialogue certainly about morality or politics or religion or the good life, right now, it’s something you have to work at. It’s not something that’s there’s some hidden hack or you have this really great questionnaire or this really good app, and now suddenly you’re going to be able to have these great conversations. These have always been things that people have earned. Philosophers, certainly, Socrates earned it through a lifetime of work.

So realizing that it’s meant to be challenging and it always has been. I think the second thing that helps in the classroom, especially when you’re meeting 18, 19-year-olds who really want to develop this skill, but are at stage one, stage zero, and probably also have bad adult role models, they see people going at each other is to design your time together in class, so that some of the bad assumptions that we inherit from our day-to-day life don’t enter into that space. And here’s what I mean, we might say that we’re going to have an hour-long class and we eventually want to get to a point where we can discuss what it is to have a good goal for family life.

This can be controversial really fast because there are different kinds of families. And there are different kinds of moral commitments that go into those families. And our culture says rush into the debating points like whatever you read in the news that day. We really try to short circuit that rush into the big debates in our class. Instead, we will spend the first five to 10 minutes of the class session, just talking about how we want to talk with each other and why these debates might sometimes feel so flawed. 

We do a lot of activities with our students where we try to give them an opportunity to know who else is in the room before they get a chance to start giving philosophical arguments. For example, if we know that given the philosophy we’ve been reading, we’re talking about what kinds of lives are worth living, that’s a topic that comes up in philosophy all the time. I want my students to have a little bit of sense about who else is in the room on that question with respect to, do people have disabled siblings or parents.

Do people come from big families or small families or do they have kind of non-traditional families? When did people in that room start getting a sense of what they thought family life meant to them? Like different people come to different realizations about how important this is, what was going on in their life when they started to develop their vision of this. Learning to tell each other’s stories a little bit and to be curious about where other people are coming from in their particular lives before we start to get into a big debate about what decisions the Supreme court should make. I think moving really intentionally and gradually is extremely important in philosophy classrooms. One, because people’s experiences are evidence for the philosophical views that they are going to take quite seriously.

And two, because we want to practice this skill of building up an understanding of the question, rather than thinking that having read about it for five minutes on a webpage, or having listened to a hot take on the radio, you have enough evidence to start working on this as a philosopher. If that makes sense. We spend a lot of time trying to get the stories out and a lot of time developing initial curiosity about what in particular has led this person to start to have these philosophical views. 

Meghan Sullivan Learning to Ask Better Questions

[00:11:51] Sean: Inherited assumptions are such a complicated thing. So many people are unwilling to drop those assumptions. And then also, as you mentioned, we all come from different backgrounds, different experiences. I’m envious because there was a point when I was a college student, over a decade ago, but I missed that opportunity to hear other people’s stories. And I’m wondering for people who aren’t in that college setting, who can’t sit down the first 10 minutes of class, is there anything you’ve seen out of the people who can change those assumptions and rework their mental models who just can’t sit down in the classroom every single day?

[00:12:22] Meghan Sullivan: I think one thing we can all work on and as we’re celebrating holidays together, and as we’re kind of forming new year’s resolutions, this could be a really good, simple resolution for all of us is learning to ask better questions. And this is the kind of thing that college dorms, college classrooms can be a really good training ground for, but you can also just resolve to work on this, at the gym and with your family members. What do I mean by better questions? I think when we want to talk about religion or politics or morality, we just want to come into a debate right away.

So I say, Sean, why do you still eat meat? It’s clearly wrong. Tell me why you hate animals so much. Those look like I just asked you a bunch of questions, but I didn’t tell you, I don’t care what you say next. I have an assumption about what you believe, and I’m really just using the questions to kind of display my reasons or to put my reasons on the table. Those are pretty weak questions. Socrates would roll over in his grave, even though he asked a lot of questions like that. What are stronger questions? Questions where I genuinely don’t know what you’re going to say next, and I’m curious about the answer because that would shape how I would talk with you about whatever topic. 

I think it’s important that we learn to talk. So instead of saying Sean, why do you still eat meat? Say like Sean, can you tell me a little bit about what food means to you? Are you the kind of person that likes to cook? Do you have really happy memories of preparing meals with your family? Or do you have weird memories? Where do your views about food come from? What’s one formative event in your life so far that involves food? And that might seem like a really broad question that’s never going to get us to this topic about helping each other figure out how we should treat animals, but it will. 

That’s part of these like baby steps of realizing first, I got to have a sense about what kinds of experiences, ideas, and philosophical principles that you might’ve become aware of over the course of your life that I just have never heard of before. And I’m coming at it from my own little cave, my own set of experiences. If this conversation goes well and I’m willing to listen to you for a bit, then maybe you’re willing to listen to me for a bit. Tell you a little bit about some of the experiences that have helped me get to my view on this.

And then if we’re really going well, and these are, again, the kinds of conversations you can have spread out over time. You can have them with somebody that you run with in the morning and just do like little pieces of it. But over time, maybe we get to the next phase, which is being able to have a conversation with each other about what might change our minds on these topics. Like how certain are you of this piece of philosophy that you’ve picked up over the course of living your life but now maybe you want to question it a little bit? 

What would it take for you to change your mind? Or will you never change your mind? In which case, it’s a good thing to know that this is one of the most important parts of your vision of the good life that you’d never be willing to revise and that’ll help me probably become a better friend to you over time. Learning to ask those kinds of questions and the initial gut check is I want to talk to somebody about this, a family member, a friend, somebody that I see a fair bit, and I’m going to ask them initial questions that I don’t know the answer to.

What’s Allowed Meghan Sullivan to Accomplish so much

[00:15:46] Sean: I think that’s very helpful, even just sparking deeper, more meaningful conversations, as opposed to just hitting those surface-level things. I love that. The questions I feel I wish people explored more because they add so much meaning to your own life, but also deepen the relationships with others. I know we’re gonna talk about relationships and love, which I’m really excited to talk about. But I would love to know first because you’re talking about understanding the person and I’m so curious. Some of your colleagues mentioned your work ethic and your drive is relentless and inspiring, and then just your accomplishments are absolutely dizzying.

It would take this entire podcast to mention all of the things you’ve done and then the number of roles you currently have. I’m hoping this can be actually something we can all learn from. What is it about you that has allowed you to dive deeply into tasks, but also accomplish so much and inspire those around you to accomplish more? I know that’s a really broad and deep question and I’m hoping you’re not too humble here. I really hope we can learn from you, and what we can take away from that.

[00:16:48] Meghan Sullivan: Some of this is the subject of philosophical reflection for those of us who are kind of like mid-career, whose jobs are going well, you spend a lot of time thinking about why is this working, or is this just luck? And how much of this is a matter of control? I do a lot of philosophy about my own job. I was thinking about that early this morning. A couple of days ago, I was down in Tennessee and I was meeting with a bunch of college students down there who are working on a project that’s kind of like God and the good life for their campus. And we were at the end of the second day and we were just having coffee and cakes and they were asking me what advice I had for them.

Especially because after this last year, they felt like they were really struggling with seeing a future or feeling like a good life was possible. They’re just kind of beaten down. I don’t know how you feel, Sean, but in the last year, a lot of people have felt really beaten down, especially in their jobs. Having a dialogue with them I think one thing I realized that’s been very important to me since I was in college and I would hope would stay really important to my current college students and those kids down in Tennessee is realizing it’s wonderful to have big desires. 

I remember being an 18-year-old at the University of Virginia and thinking I want to work for the very best law firm that would possibly hire me someday. I want to go to Yale or Harvard Law School, and I want that kind of job. And then I want the kind of life that kind of job will make possible. Those are desires I felt really strongly when I was 18, 19 years old. And even though my life didn’t take that direction and I’m glad it didn’t take that direction. I love my current job so much more than I would have loved that job. 

It was really good for me at that point in my life to realize that there are things I really wanted for the future and that I was the kind of person that was capable of really wanting and hoping for things. You start up those kinds of fires within yourself, and then as long as you’re open-minded and discerning, and you’re looking for opportunities, and you’re asking yourself constantly this question about whether it’s pointed in the right direction that’s what’s going to drive you to go forward. We should be very nervous and we should be trying to help each other when we feel like that fire’s going out. 

When you look at an 18-year-old and they don’t even have crazy dreams anymore, that’s rough. Or when I look at colleagues or people I work with, and they have a hard time listing what they’d be really excited about achieving next year, that’s not great. And that may become surprising maybe for a philosopher, especially a philosopher with a religious background, like me to say that you should have these drives because philosophy is usually pretty critical. Some of the goals that we set for ourselves, tell us these goals are shallow. And oftentimes we discover over time that they are, that that’s not what gives us the good life. That’s not what completes us. 

But to get to the really good deep goals, and to really be the kind of people that we want to be, we have to start where we’re at with some of the drives that we currently have and the desires that we currently have. One thing I’ve been really proud of is the way that I’ve made hard decisions. Over the course of the last, like 20 years of my adult life, I’ve always kind of honored those desires and tried to use philosophy and use the opportunities that I found myself into to elevate them. And always shoot for things that are higher or more important, but not be dismissive or willing to give up on them. 

People always want really practical advice, especially because I write about the good life and I write about time and rationality. People always want to know my time management strategies. I have to go to all these workshops at work too about time management and work-life balance. And here I’ll just be honest with you and your listeners. I am horrible at work-life balance. I don’t know if other people say this as well, work, and life is just one huge smeary cloud for me. I’m very disciplined during the daytime between eight and five, because I collaborate and I have so many people who are depending on me and so many group projects. 

With running a research Institute and with teaching a big class I have to be really careful about my schedule and I have to be on time and prepared for meetings that are crammed in like Tetris blocks during the day. But when I get done with work, I am not very disciplined at all about my time. I’ll kind of spend a couple of hours doing philosophy projects really slowly or like taking a long meandering walk or promising somebody I’d finish a project for them, and then taking five times as long as I probably should have. I’ve realized this since I was a grad student. I enjoy having a portion of every day where I am just kind of zoning out and working on things, but really inefficiently. 

I think it drives some of my friends and family members crazy because I’ll want to have a conversation with them, and there’ll be assuming that it’s like a 20, 25-minute check-in and I’ll really want the conversation if it’s in the evening to go on for like two hours and to be a little bit meandering and pointless. I think that throws them for a loop. I’m also a big fan of noticing the kinds of inefficiencies in your life that make you really happy. I take a great deal of joy in work. Sometimes that means being really like, we’re going to get X, Y, and Z done really fast and really efficiently. And sometimes it means just kind of languishing in a project.

Why Young People are Feeling Bogged Down

[00:22:36] Sean: One of the things you were mentioning at the beginning of this, that’s just so deeply troubling to me is we were talking about how a lot of people are feeling bogged down and not having this deeper connection or bigger meaning. And I know even in the book you mentioned in the seventies, 80% of college freshmen said one of their most important goals was to find a more meaningful and purposeful life. 

And in 2018 it was down to 42% and 80% said their goal was just to make money, become rich, something like that. And that’s just so deeply troubling. I have two young kids and I’m thinking about the world they’re going to be growing up in. And then obviously like even what we’re living in today, I would just love to hear you unpack, why you think that is, and then what the future looks like. If we have an entire generation and that’s kind of what their aspirations are.

[00:23:15] Meghan Sullivan: It’s such an interesting question. I actually got those statistics from a psychology professor who was here at our Institute last year. Her name’s Sara Konrath, and she just wrote a book about burnout. She’s done a lot of these like meta-analyses of what’s going on with young people. And it is super sad. My initial temptation is to say, well, these young college students are feeling this kind of nihilism because the world is in such a rough spot right now. And they’re just responding to the kind of world that they are going to live out their lives in. But that can’t be true, right? 

I mean, if you go in the Wayback machine to the sixties and seventies, that was a pretty rough time to be a young person as well. The Vietnam war is raging. So a lot of your classmates are going to fight in this deadly battle and didn’t understand what exactly the purpose of it was. There were massive protests on college campuses back then. There was the threat of nuclear war that was kind of hanging over everybody’s heads. It’s not the case that the world has made it harder for young people in the United States to want a good life. 

It’s just always been hard during all of our lifetimes to figure out how we’re going to live our lives, and what’s really worth wanting. I think the change has gotta be the combination of the messages that we’ve been sending them about what they can hope for, what’s possible in their lives. And also the ways that we’ve set up high schools and colleges and the kinds of structures that they engage in, where they just don’t have time to think about anything else. One take I have, and I’ve been very moved by having my youngest brother go through college and early adulthood. I’m the oldest kid in our family.

My parents had children every seven and a half, eight years of their marriage. Some 15 years older than my baby brother Connor. Connor just graduated from Brown and watched what he had to go through as a high school student at a big public high school in Florida to try to gain access to a really good college and to get funding for it. He had to basically work an 80 hour-week since he was 15 years old to try to get access to this opportunity, which is no joke. It’s an incredibly important opportunity for a young person. 

And then when he got to college, he had a lot more freedom to choose majors, to choose his classes, and to choose who wanted to be friends with, but he didn’t have a lot of guidance for how to make those choices. And that has its own kind of really intense stress because when you’re 19, 20 years old, you’re putting on these bets on the table that are going to shape the decisions that you make down the road. You decide, I love this idea of going to law school, so I’m going to put all my eggs in the pre-law basket, which is really demanding. And then you start to work towards that goal.

If you don’t have people talking with you all along the way about whether or not that’s still a great goal for you, how that’s going to fit with other things that you’re going to want out of your life, then you hit those roadblocks, you get a bad grade on an econ exam, or you realize the summer between your second and third year, you don’t really want to be a lawyer that can be totally derailing. It’s hard for you to want other things after that. I think we’ve set up these kinds of systems that promise young people they’re going to give them the good life. 

And if they just clear this next hurdle, they’re going to be happy. And young people get really good at clearing those hurdles, but that’s why the kind of pre-professional systems that we’ve set up is not going to make them happy. A lot of the courses we teach them in college are not going to ultimately help them make them happy. They’re just going to be stepping points in this bigger goal that they’re trying to figure out. 

And I think we don’t talk enough about that journey either with college students anymore. Or if we do, we do it at new student orientation, or we do it with the brochures that we give them and their parents. But when it comes time to actually prove that college leaders that you’re their first bosses, when they start their first jobs really care about them developing in this way, we don’t often live up to our aspirations to care or mentor them. 

Eudaimonia

[00:27:45] Sean: How do you define the good life?

[00:27:48] Meghan Sullivan: Eudaimonia. Did you read the book, Sean? Philosophers have invented a technical term to convince you that we know the answer to this question. I read Aristotle when I was a junior in college. I actually made it pretty far into college before I actually learned that much about the Greeks and this part of the history of philosophy. Aristotle has this class that he taught at the Lyceum 2,400 years ago, where he was working with his students on this question, what will it take for us to lead happy lives or to be happy people? 

He spends the first couple chapters of the book that captures this class on this question about what exactly is it that we’re aiming at? He gives this analogy of you might be the world’s best Archer, but if you don’t have a sense of where the target is, the whole activity is pointless. Even aiming is pointless. He talks about the goal of our lives being this thing he calls eudaimonia, which is a state of being a person who’s developed all of her functions or his functions as a human being. Being the kind of thing that they were meant to be. Everything in Aristotle’s universe has a function.

A knife can be a better or worse knife. It can be better if it’s really sharp, it can be worse if it’s really dull. And if it gets to the point where it can’t cut anything at all, then it’s pointless, literally and figuratively, it’s not even a knife. Aristotle thinks maybe harshly controversially in the history of philosophy that humans have a function. A function that for him is determined by what makes us special among all of the animals. The fact that we’re rational and social and that when our lives are going really well, we’re fulfilling this like rational social animal part of our nature. 

In the same way, Wolf’s life is going really well if it’s able to hunt, able to reproduce, and live in a pack really well. And Aristotle thinks one of the things that separates us also from other animals is that we can worry about whether we’re being good humans. Wolves don’t lose a lot of sleep over whether they suck at being a Wolf. But we wonder about this all the time. We read advice, we listened to podcasts about the good life because we’re constantly asking these questions. Like an Archer is trying to find the bullseye, we’re always trying to fine-tune and look for whether or not we need a direction change. 

I think the good life is the goal of that kind of search. And when it’s going really well, the place that we are hopefully going to end up at the end of our lives. It’s a little bit more talking about the goal of our life being something that we’ll achieve around the time that we die. Aristotle was also very worried about this. It’s kind of a dark view of philosophy. He has this line that he takes from the Salon where he’s like, maybe we won’t know if anybody’s happy until they’ve already died on this approach. And that’s a dark way of looking at that, but there’s also this, I think, a really affirming way of thinking about this idea of the good life.

It’s something that I’m aiming at over the course of my whole life. And it’s the kind of goal that has all of these intermediate chapters, having a great job, being an excellent member of my family, being an excellent friend, being a friend sometimes to different people, right? Because our friendships change over the course of our life. None of those is eudaimonia, like the good life, the final flat, like the arrow hitting the target, but they’re all these course corrections that are getting me closer to that target. 

And those phases of my life end, when I retire someday. If you have children and they grow up and your children move out of the house and you’ve completed the parenthood phase of life, it’s a good thing that wasn’t your comprehensive goal for human happiness, because then you’d have nothing left to look forward to. And the nice thing about Aristotle’s conception of the good life is, there’s always kind of a bigger, more comprehensive goal that’s going to be waiting for you to point at it.

Stoicism 

[00:31:58] Sean: I know the Stoics have really focused on virtues, as opposed to all these other things that we should just avoid. And I’m wondering about your take on that. Should we focus solely on the virtues? And if so, how do you even look at virtues today?

[00:32:12] Meghan Sullivan: During the first phase of the pandemic, and I don’t know where you are, Sean, I’m at the point now where I talk about the chapters of the pandemic in my life. During the first chapter of the pandemic, that March, when we sent all of our college students home from school and we were doing zoom classes and we were all baking bread all the time. If you remember alone in our houses, I read so much stoicism. We all have this kind of philosophy that’s on deck to help us in whatever particular crisis we’re facing in our life. And I turned to Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus. 

Those were the guys that I really wanted to read in the first phase of the pandemic, and I think part of it was that there are philosophers that give you counseling when you don’t have control anymore, or when you feel like you’ve got to find something that’s really good about your life, but there’s so much that’s outside of your control. A global pandemic is definitely outside of your control. I find that in these moments where my life is really turbulent or it’s very hard to see the future, stoicism really has this appeal because it says, look, even if there’s so much in your life that you can’t predict what will happen next, you still have what you care about, like your innermost desires. 

You still have the kind of person that you aspire to be and are trying to be. And all of those goals are going to be affected by your circumstances, but you always have the choice of making your circumstances work to your growth and advantage. I think that certainly in times where we find ourselves really disrupted or it’s really hard to see the future stoicism has its attractions. Those periods of feeling helpless or not having control also go away. Then you hit the second or third phase of the pandemic when you’re like, man, I have a lot of choices that I can make that could shape the kind of world that we live in. 

And that the kind of person that I am could make a difference to the kinds of circumstances that I face. When you feel more empowered, stoicism starts to feel a little bit like it doesn’t have enough to offer you because the Stoics are constantly telling you, don’t worry about your current situation. Don’t pay attention to the way that fate is shifting your life around right now, and just turn inward and focus on yourself. Sometimes you got to pay attention to the opportunities that fate is throwing your way and the way that that’s shaping the story that you’re telling in your life right now. 

I feel like I’m in a period of my life right now where the pandemic’s ending, and the world is changing very rapidly. Colleges, the kinds of places where I spend most of my time, are going through this period of massive change. And rather than feeling like that’s all outside of my control, I like the kind of philosophy, the kinds of virtue ethics that say, look you’re going to be part of one character in the story of all of these changes that are happening, and you should feel like you want to pay really close attention to what’s going on in the world right now.

And see if you can possibly shift things a little bit, nudge them in a direction that you think is good or bad. In periods where you feel a little bit more urgency, I think stoicism can fade a little bit and you get much more interested in virtue ethicists like Plato. Plato was always involved in Athenian affairs and getting mixed up and had views about how good people would be involved in their government. Rambling a little bit, but when the life of action keys up, we should be ready for it. Stoicism is my closest off.

Consuming Philosophical Texts

[00:35:55] Sean: I really appreciate the insights. This might be a little bit nuanced, but I’m always intrigued by people who have a deep understanding of certain things. You mentioned pandemic hits you focus more on Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus. And so I think a lot of people hearing that who might not know where to start,is it page 1? Obviously, you’ve gone through all of Epictetus work before, do you have specific phrases or passages you’ve kept that when hard times hit you dive immediately into those, or are you just picking up the book and just going through it?

[00:36:28] Meghan Sullivan: I am a huge fan of what I call garbage disposal reading. I think a lot of folks approach these really old texts like they have to read the whole thing from beginning to end and they have to pause and ruminate to understand anytime they start to get confused or they don’t know the context. And that means a lot of folks never get to read really great philosophy. I’m a big fan of buying these books, having them around your house. And when you feel the need, if you get sent home from work due to the Pandemic and it’s 5:00 PM, 6:00 PM, and you’re looking to waste some time while dinner cooks, pick up the book and just start reading the thing that most intrigues you or calls you into it. 

Go until you get bored, then stop and read something else. If you’re going to be a philosophy Ph.D. student, if you’re one of my graduate students read the whole book, I’m going to test on it. But if you’re somebody that just wants to enjoy philosophy, a lot of philosophy was meant to be taken off in these little pieces and then digested and debated. If you tried to pick up a book by Mencius or Confucius, or by one of the great Stoics like Marcus Aurelius at first, you might be totally freaked out because they don’t read like essays. 

They don’t have an introduction that tells you here’s what I’m going to explain to you about the good life in this book. And then they go through, that form didn’t exist when they were writing those books. Instead, they have a bunch of little sayings and passages and snippets. Marcus Aurelius opens up the meditation by introducing you to a bunch of his friends and family members and what he thinks about them. That’s where he starts the book. And you’re thinking, well, what’s the point in this? For Marcus, he would go back and read through his journals or think about his journals till he found whichever friendship he really wanted to spend time thinking about that day. 

The journal was a reminder, a note for him to think more deeply about something that was going to be part of his conversation and thought process. Same with Confucius and Mencius you read their “books”. And I put books in quotes here because they were never meant to be books. They’re these passages that gifted teachers would use as reminders or notes to start to have conversations about these topics with their students, but they were meant to be conversation starters, like little pieces that you take and use to inspire your own philosophy and philosophy is meant to be consumed that way.

I also think that many religious texts are meant to be consumed that way. It made a huge difference for me. I became a Catholic in college. And I was extremely intimidated by reading books about Catholicism when I was that age because they were just way too hard. I didn’t really understand the context and I didn’t get anything out of them. Then I felt dumb and I felt like I was a bad person. And then one of the things that really helped me was starting to buy paperback translations of different parts of the Bible that felt just like normal books. They didn’t have gilded edges. They didn’t have super thin pieces of paper that felt magic.

They were just books and you could pick them up and you could think about them. And then think about whether you thought the story was interesting or who you related to, in the story. And if you got bored, you could skip ahead, and realizing that you could consume it that way meant that it became part of my inner life. And it became things that I would remember and make connections with. If you do that with  Marcus Aurelius the first time you read him in peacetime, then when the pandemic hits you think I remember Marcus Aurelius wrote a lot about baking bread and I’m baking a lot of bread these days.

I would like a philosophical approach to all this bread baking during the pandemic. And you can go back and go into the book and pull more of what’s good about it. I think it’s just kind of reading around and not worrying so much even about whether you’re doing it right. And again, if you get a pass at a qualifying exam for a philosophy Ph.D., then you should worry a lot about whether you’re doing it right. 

But if you’re somebody who just wants to enjoy philosophy, gather up these books, read through them until you get bored, then pick up new things and let your kind of curiosity in your conscience guide you through the material that’s going to be helpful. And, over time, you’re going to get more accurate by just continuing to read. And by having conversations with other people, by listening to podcasts too, by letting more stuff kind of feed into your system.

Meghan Sullivan on Developing The Philosophy Course at Notre Dame

[00:40:54] Sean: You mentioned letting curiosity guide you, but then also that connection with the material. And so one of the things I’m really in awe of, Meghan is, you created this course at Notre Dame and Art of the Good Life that has connected with thousands and thousands of students. And that has led to your new book, but I’m curious, at the start what spurred you to create this course, and at the outset, did you have any idea it would connect this deeply with people?

[00:41:19] Meghan Sullivan: Definitely, did not know at the outset that it would be this successful. What happened for me is I’ve been teaching at Notre Dame for a few years. I’ve been teaching a really big introduction to Philosophy class. And Notre Dame, like a lot of Catholic schools, makes every single student take an introduction to Philosophy. But if you asked us why you’d get a million different answers from across my department about why students need to know philosophy. I’ve been thinking a lot about that question because I was teaching in a really big auditorium. 

I was teaching a lot of freshmen the intro class, was like, what are we doing here? I remember I pulled my students one year and I asked on the first day of class, how many of you guys could imagine being a Philosophy major? And the final result was like 2% of the students in this large auditorium could even imagine being a Philosophy major. I could imagine being a toaster. I can imagine becoming president of the United States, imagination is such a low threshold for thinking about something as a possibility.

And 98% of my students didn’t even think about it as a possibility. So realizing we’re spending 14 weeks with these students, they’re not going to be me when they grow up, which is probably good. I want to give them something that’s going to be really valuable, no matter what they do next. I always taught Aristotle. You get to the second chapter of Aristotle’s book about the good life, The Nicomachean ethics, and he pauses for his students, and he says we are not undertaking this examination. We’re not taking this class so that we can know what virtue is, so that we can be able to define all of Plato’s philosophical terms, but rather so we can be happy.

Otherwise, there’s no benefit in this. And I just remember, I used to give that as a quiz question to my students. What does  Aristotle mean here? And what he means is that a good life is not something that you get by just learning a bunch of philosophical facts. It’s something that you learn by developing this capacity to see yourself in the world that Philosophers like  Aristotle thought that they taught people how to do. I remember being fired up about that and thinking when did we kind of lose faith that in college students could start to develop a different way of seeing themselves and seeing the world as a result of our classes, rather than just repeating out a bunch of philosophical debates of dead people in history.

I started thinking about that really seriously, as a course design problem. We just don’t even set that out as a goal, so of course, we never achieve it. But what would happen if we just told students the first day of class, I want you to be happier people at the end of this class. And here’s the kind of happiness that I think is possible for humans. And here’s how we’re going to try to do it. And if we fail, that’s going to be really interesting. One part of it was I’m a true believer in Philosophy and I’ve always really believed in that but wanted to try it out on my own students the way  Aristotle did on his. 

Another thing that turned out to be really magical is how we set up the class and this comes out a lot in the book that my colleague Paul and I wrote, I’m a total news junkie. Like I told you, I waste a lot of time in the evenings. One of the things that I waste hours on is reading the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and Harvard Business Review. I just will go down the rabbit hole of wanting to consume as much news as possible. My dad was a cameraman for the local news station when I was in high school. And I think that’s where I caught it. 

But one of the things I’ve been thinking about for years and years is when I read the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, I see Philosophy everywhere. Like people making philosophical stands that are crazy, or that are well justified, or that are really good examples of something that people were worried about in the enlightenment. I have a huge folder on my computer called philosophically interesting news stories that I just save as I see them. And realizing I wanted to do something with that. 

I wanted students to not just think that these questions and issues were ones that people dealt with in the medieval period or in the enlightenment or in ancient Greece, but they’re problems that we are all still dealing with right now. And that if they know a little bit of philosophy, maybe they’re going to see moves that other people are not seeing, or they’ll understand something a couple of levels deeper. And so started having this, hundreds and hundreds of news articles in that folder and realizing we can start to build the class around that. 

And using my knowledge, my colleagues’ knowledge of philosophy is like prescriptions for these problems that are unfolding this week. And that’s a weird way to design a philosophy class. You might think, well, one thing is you have to change the class every semester if you’re going to take that approach because there’s always more news. Life is always throwing more stuff at us to do philosophy about. And I think we realized that that was kind of exciting and that we were up for that challenge, but it also means that you’re never going to take a class like this work really hard on it and then crystallize it in amber and just have it be the perfect static thing for the rest of time.

[00:46:21] Sean: You mentioned creating that course, it was all around course design, system design, and then obviously, you’re going to launch it and you’re going to learn from certain things that didn’t work well, and the things that did. How different is the course today, from that first course you launched?

[00:46:33] Meghan Sullivan: I get this question a lot and we’ve got it, my colleagues, Paul Blaschko and Justin Christie, and some of my other Notre Dame colleagues like Brian Cutter and Laura Callahan. There are a lot of philosophers that work in the class with us. And any time we add somebody to the core team, it mutates and evolves because there are new philosophers with their new hot takes and insights that are going to be part of creating the culture of the class. And then obviously we hire a lot of students to be involved in building the class with us and students change faster than anybody else like their tastes and what they think is really important. 

That’s something that we’re always trying to respond to. The core vision of the class, we have this right up front on the syllabus on the internet. We have designed this class so that in 14 weeks you can start to answer big questions about what it will take for you to lead a happy life. That has been constant throughout. We had raised eyebrows when we first announced that we were doing this and people didn’t think that we were that serious. We got a lot of raised eyebrows. But we were like, no, seriously, we’re going to teach a class that’s going to try to make 18, 19-year-olds a lot happier and happier in this enduring philosophical sense.

And if we fail, we’re going to own it. If our students end up nihilists or end up having bad lives as a result of this class, that’s going to be really interesting evidence for the future of philosophy. We change up the assignments all the time. The core assignment has remained relatively stable. We’ve learned how to teach people how to do it in more effective ways. We’ve changed our tactics, but the vision of the class is that at the end of that week 14, every student taking the class will have written this thing, we call it a philosophical apology. Which are stories from their life so far and philosophical arguments and reasons that are explaining how they’re finding that goal for their life right now. 

So we asked them questions like, are you going to practice any religion as an adult or going forward? And we try to dig in, okay, well, what’s your experience or lack of experience with religion so far in your life right now. Which figures that we’ve studied, you identify with, or you don’t identify with? What are your reasons? What are you going to say to Nietzsche? What are you going to say to Aquinas? And students work on that essay and they try to develop it. And one of the things that we’ve noticed teaching this course to thousands of Notre Dame students is the first semester or two that we taught the class, getting students to understand the value of that assignment, it was kind of hard.

They’re like, what is this? Can I just write an essay about Aquinas’s arguments? Like, no, this is about you, your vision of the good life. And they have a little bit of a difficult time grappling with what we were asking from them. And of course, as I said, at the beginning of this interview, they really want to please us. So they really want that more than needing to understand what we want them to write rather than what they ought to be writing. But once we had a couple of generations of iterations of Notre Dame’s students successfully do that assignment and really love it, then we had examples in other students’ lives. 

Where you could say, look at what Sam Kennedy did, his essay, it’s an incredibly moving essay about how he’s thinking about what family life and religion are going to mean to him going forward. You could have an essay that’s like Sam’s except it’s yours, and it has your own weird stories behind it. And once they saw examples, they were like, oh, this is going to be really cool. And now that assignment is really easy for us to help students complete because there’s this whole culture that does a bunch of that kind of quiet educating around it here at Notre Dame. 

We’re always messing with the midterm assignment we oscillate between; should we teach them how to do debates, should we teach them how to do massive group projects? For a couple of years, we experimented with this assignment where we asked them all to do some direct action that brought the good life to Notre Dame. And that assignment was really fun, but also sometimes went totally off the rails and got us in trouble. There’s definitely a culture of experimentation around the class, but the big vision and the core assignment that has been part of the DNA, that’s been the battery for it ever since we started.

Meghan Sullivan – The Impact of Accurate Storytelling 

[00:50:42] Sean: One of the things I want to make a mental note of that we dive back into is just having models and role models. But I would love to know, you mentioned writing this essay here, the apology essay, how important and what is the impact of storytelling and contemplation for our own lives? I think it’s like one of the key things there that that essay gets out of everyone.

[00:51:10] Meghan Sullivan: I think that learning to tell better, more accurate stories about why we are the people that we are, and being able to share that with other people, is part of the core of the good life. I believe that philosophically, but over the course of the last few years, one of the things that my co-author Paul and I did when we tried to take the God and the good life course and translate it into a book is we really worked through a bunch of the assignments that we had been giving to our Notre Dame students to help them work on telling the stories of their life, and we wrote out the answers in our lives. 

We include little snippets of this in the book to just trying to kind of put our money where our mouth is. We say that this works, but have we really tried it? And that has been transformative for each of us. We thought that we were well-established happy adults, and then I took on the assignment a year ago of thinking about what money means to me. A question that we’ve given tons of Notre Dame students, but I’d never sat down and tried to write out my answer, and thinking about that required me to think a lot about the sacrifices that my parents made for us when we were kids.

And when we started to realize that those were sacrifices and how much time I spend at work and how much I’m willing to do to get a raise. And what does it mean to get a raise, why don’t I give more money to charity and how exactly do I pick charities? It’s easy to talk about that theoretically, it is extremely hard for most of us, most of my adult friends to say, this is how much money I think I need to make to be a happy person. And this is how much I’m willing to sacrifice my current life to support these particular people that I feel I owe something to. 

Being willing to put that down, certainly in our case, being willing to then share it very publicly was really hard. It made me feel really vulnerable, but also made me realize which kinds of moral values were really central to me and which kinds of things I’d say to people really mattered to me, but it was never really willing to make a sacrifice to enact. Being able to know what your morality is for me meant dealing with a lot of these questions about how the simple thing I interact with every day, money has affected a bunch of other decisions that I’m willing to make or not make. 

And you can’t get to that abstract, you have to get into the kind of person that you’re aspiring to be and your self-image and what it means for you to love other people in your family and what it means to think that the world has hope in it. If you direct your energies towards something else, and those are all things that you really start to understand through storytelling and by sharing those stories, I think it was also profoundly important for me to start to write out my answers to those questions. 

And first I’d show them to Paul, then Paul would show me the questions that he was working on and it’d be like, yeah, that really sounds like you. Or sometimes if you’ve got a good philosophy friend as I do in my co-author I’d show him a story and he’d be like, this is propaganda. You’re not really like this. In the chapter on love, I talk a lot about loving my parents and what it means to love them, and loving family members can be extraordinarily hard. 

And I remember having a couple of early drafts with Paul and he’s like, you’re making yourself out to be like the hero in all of these transactions. And they’re always the ones that are making mistakes, but that’s definitely not. I know your parents, that’s not true. And also learning from your friends and your loved ones, who you do philosophy with, how to tell better stories about yourself. I think that that’s a huge part of how you start to figure out what this eudaimonia, this good life goal is that you’re aiming at.

Meghan Sullivan – Goalless Activities

[00:54:50] Sean: You mentioned friendship, family, and love. I have a few close friends that we explore, super deep things, and then we question each other really deeply. I’ve said, again and again, that is without a doubt, the best use of my time in terms of understanding myself better is that deep connection with a friendship where we can explore each other.

It is just so helpful. I just want to highlight that and I know the book really highlights that. And I just appreciate that. One of the things you also talked about I’m really intrigued by, or the goalless activities. You’ve mentioned at the beginning, all of your students, it’s like, we just want to look good for the professor. We want to check this box and I’m wondering how you approach goalless activities.

[00:55:30] Meghan Sullivan: It’s one of the things that’s been really fun trying to teach. This is one of the most confusing and hard problems in the history of philosophy. This idea of are there things that are good about our lives, that we can’t do anything to maximize or promote, or what would it be for something to be good if it’s not the kind of thing that you could always be aiming at, like an Archer? This is something Plato and Aristotle had like a famous, huge breakup over exactly this topic. It’s hard to even conceptualize what it would be. 

This is another area where the pandemic just helped me realize aspects of philosophy that I had only ever dealt with theoretically before but realized how visceral they are. One of the things that happened to me last year, and this has been a subject of much philosophical reflection in my life ever since then is I went from being a hyper scheduled person, you know, I could always tell you what I’m doing next week, what I’m doing next month, I’m going to go to Scotland and I’m going to give this lecture, and then I’m going to come back and I’m going to conquer this goal or whatever.

All those just got wiped off the table. And really suddenly like over the course of just a few days, remember they canceled the Olympics, and then suddenly all my schedule just got wiped out and I had to deal with this. What does it mean to be a great person, to be a really great version of myself if I don’t know when these activities are coming back or what it will mean for them to come? And I thought, ah, this is maybe what Plato was talking about when he talked about the life of contemplation or this is the stuff we’ve got left to think about are the Stoics, the stuff that’s left to think about when all of the activities are put on pause.

What do I still find good? The kind of goalless activities is the times you spend thinking this is what’s really wonderful about my life that’s not going to end. It doesn’t have a deadline. It’s not the kind of thing that I could log on to my CV, but it’s still really good. And if I look for it, its goodness can be more accessible to me. Okay. What are examples of that? One and I learned about this quite a bit, actually from my colleague, Paul, he’s got three young kids. And during the pandemic, he said, one of the places where he started to find this kind of goalless goodness was just taking walks with his kids.

He would just go out. In South Bend, in the spring you go from horrible, cold snow to suddenly all the trees are blooming. And he remembers this day, there was nothing to do at work because everything had been canceled. So he just took this really long walk with his three-year-old and they stopped and looked at all the leaves and he realized all the other things I do in my life are for moments like this. Just pause and realize this is the value being realized. It’s why I worked so hard. So let’s just sit here with it and let the value be realized in my life right now. 

[00:58:52] Sean: I just love that approach because so many people, like when that moment is there, it’s right in front of us, we’re trying to jump to the next thing. And I have young kids, so the same thing too, right? We can forget about the phone, all those other things, just watching the kid fully immersed in running or jumping on a tree is just like the most beautiful thing that you can have in your life. And we are so quick to jump to that next thing. I just think it’s important, it’s a refresher to other people that, you know what, when we have those moments, it might be a beautiful sunset, something like that, pause, enjoy that. That’s more about the good life.

[00:59:26] Meghan Sullivan: Oh, definitely. And I think even when the stress comes back, there’s how you enjoy this when you have time off or when activity is low, then there’s also how you find this kind of goalless value when everything’s really busy and super stressful like you’re a new parent or work is going full steam. One of the things philosophy gives us is advice about how to find it when it’s not just happening innately. I can remember, I went to get my flu shot two weeks ago, and it was just like the busiest day ever. And I was waiting in this huge long line of face masked people to go get a shot and thinking just like, oh my gosh, I’m so stressed. 

But I’m in the line and thinking, you know what, I’m so glad, like how cool to just be alive. How cool to have conscious existence right now. And even though I’m waiting in line and I don’t exactly know what’s going to happen next, or I feel like I’ve got all these goals ahead of me today, but none of them are really making me feel excited right now, I can still pause and say even with all the stress for today, how amazing, I am getting this time to be alive right now. Sounds like a hippy insight, but it’s the kind of thing that we all often do have to actively remind ourselves of. 

And one thing philosophy is good at is pointing out goals that we kind of miss if we’re not paying attention. One goal or source of value in life is just the fact that we’re alive. Like, oh my gosh, I’m a healthy person. I’m about to go get this technology injected into my arm and I don’t know how neat that is, it’s like a Monday, and that I am here to experience it. And learning how to actually notice that you give us just a little bit more power to get through the busier periods when we don’t have time to appreciate it.

Meghan Sullivan – Importance of Role Models

[01:01:27] Sean: Meghan, the problem with conversations like this is I could literally spend an entire day just asking you some of these deep questions. I know I need to be respectful of your time here. One thing I do want to hit on is you mentioned role models multiple times, and just the impact of studying those who’ve been there before or deep insights. What have you learned about the importance of that and the impact it has?

[01:01:49] Meghan Sullivan: We’ve talked a little bit about Marcus Aurelius and the Stoics today, and on the question of role models or just other people in our lives, he has coincidentally been one of my favorite philosophers. I mentioned that he starts off the Meditations by just going through these particular people in his life and what he’s learned from observing their life. And he talks about teachers that he’s had, but he also talks about friends. He talks about admiring this one friend who had a bit of horrible, horrible luck. Just everything seemed to go wrong for this guy, and he dealt with it with such dignity. 

Marcus noticed that about his friend, that his friend just could deal with suffering with dignity and aspire to be that kind of person. I think it’s an amazing practice for us, especially in the wintertime, as we kind of pivot into a new year to not think about our goals and resolutions really abstractly, but to be able to go through these lists and to think, okay, this professor that I had in college, he taught me how to debate with style. The thing, I most admired about him was that not only would he present a really hard argument clearly, but he did it with such joy and panache. 

I would like to be the kind of person that has that dimension of his life in my life this year. Or you think about my brother who dealt with a lot of unemployment last year and kind of like Marcus Aurelius’s friend dealt with it with such dignity and was always there for his wife and was always really open about what was happening, but also kept hope going. I noticed that about him, maybe I’ll even have the courage to say that to him. Sometimes it’s hard to tell people why you admire them or love them, but at the very least notice and reflect on it and think like that’s real life. 

When somebody’s dealing with their own real circumstances where there was something really wonderful or good that came out of it, I want to try for my life to be part of that. So making it particularly specific to people that are in your life and trying to be honest and concrete about what it is that you admire in them, those are the kinds of insights that the Stoics knew. And I think I’m starting to understand that is going to be lasting. The opposite of that is to say, I just completely admire Taylor Swift, which I do.

She’s killing it right now. I love how famous she is and how she seems to be just resiliently famous. I don’t know why that’s working for her. It’s a mystery to me. It’s not close enough to my own situation for it to be really instructive for how I’m living my life. I would like to have her as my hero, but she’s not really going to be like my philosophical guide the way some of those other people would be. But she is my hero.

Meghan Sullivan – Long-form Conversation With Anyone Dead or Alive

[01:04:40] Sean: I was spending some time with your upcoming book, The Good Life Method this morning, and actually came across that exercise. And I put that in my personal note to do this, literally think about some of the people, friends, teachers, things like that. And what did you learn from them, what do you admire about them? I just really appreciate that exercise. I’m wondering if you could do this long-form conversation, I know there’s a lot of those models you look towards and you can just have a deep conversation with anyone dead or alive, just not a family member or friend, who would you just love asking some of these questions of?

[01:05:11] Meghan Sullivan: Ooh, that’s a really good question. This will sound like it just counteracts what I said about Taylor Swift because there’s another celebrity, but I’m a huge admirer of Pope Francis. He lives a life that is just so different from mine. He has this humongous, complicated, deeply aspirational, super screwed-up church that he has to lead, that’s distributed all around the world and everybody’s looking to him for guidance. He also has to understand this really messy 2000-year-old religion that’s changed a lot over time and is going through a period of really rapid change right now.

Every time I hear him speak or reflect, I’m always surprised. Like I never quite saw that coming in a way that makes them really intriguing to me. Somebody that’s clearly thinking about the whole scope of his life and our lives and in human history. So he’s got a really big expansive notion of what’s worth going after. And he’s definitely got his own take on it, which every time I get a little glimpse into it, I’ll read a letter that he writes or hear about one of his press conferences. He’s somebody that I just always have a bunch of questions for. Like, why did you say that? Or where is this coming from?

Or what experience are you drawing from? I would really love to have a conversation about the good life with him. He’s got a ton of integrity. I think he also puts his money where his mouth is. He’s very much trying to live out the kind of life that you would hope for the rest of us. But he’s dealing with problems that are ones that are so much bigger in scope than the ones that I’ve ever encountered. I feel like he’s somebody that could learn a lot from. Taylor Swift would also be pretty cool. I’ve got a lot of, how did she do it? What are those songs about? I have a lot of questions about who broke her heart. 

I think part of enjoying philosophy and sticking with these conversations is realizing sometimes they’re extraordinarily serious. When you’re talking with loved ones about end-of-life questions, those are going to be really serious conversations. But a lot of times philosophy is just like fun and funny and weird and surprising. And we enjoy having these conversations about our religious lives and our moral lives a lot more when we can let our guard down a little bit and just realize that a lot of it is funny and surprising, and we don’t quite know what we’re doing and we’re trying to figure it out with each other and we keep getting curveballs. 

And realizing that you see these big existential questions in funny and surprising places and part of the good life is recognizing those dimensions of it, and being willing. I’d love to talk philosophy with Taylor Swift or somebody in a really silly mode too. I think that would make me a lot more understanding.

Meghan Sullivan – Great Philosophical Books

[01:08:16] Sean: It’d be interesting to get her perspective. Meghan, you mentioned learning, this is the final one. You’ve read so much, you’ve been exposed to so many interesting thinkers and you just like really lasting books that for someone who was like, you know what, yeah, this is really intriguing. I am really curious about what Meghan said and obviously going to pick up her book, The Good Life Method, but any other books you think people might really enjoy learning more?

[01:08:39] Meghan Sullivan: This sounds like philosophy 1 0 1 and a lot of people had to suffer through it in college, but it’s worth another look is Plato’s Republic. It’s a book that’s hard to read. But if you have a couple of pointers and bits of guidance I think it’s a great book to read right now. The opening starts with Socrates and his friends debating whether or not the good life is just about having as much power as you can over other people and not ever feeling vulnerable or whether or not there are some things that we hope for like justice that requires us to want to give up our power or to just rethink how we’re living in really fundamental ways.

I think that just feels like such a live question right now for us. Plato talks a lot about things like, how should we educate young people and what kinds of things should we aspire to give to them? And why do we remain so ignorant? Those are all questions that the Republic takes up, which again, it’s going to be weird and it’ll be a little bit of a difficult read, but it’s worth spending some time on right now. If you want to just a fun philosophical read besides The Good Life Method, which you should definitely order, there’s a philosopher that died a couple of years ago, named Derek Parfit, who wrote this book called Reasons and Persons. 

I always tell my students that this book reminds me of the treasure chest at the doctor’s office when you were a kid. I don’t know if you had this, but whenever I had to go to the doctor as a kid if you were really good on the way out, and my doctor had this huge box of all just random toys, like all kinds of random stuff. And that the randomness was the excitement. You’d go and you pull something out and no matter what, it would be interesting and weird and you could take it home. And Derek Parfit’s  Reasons and Persons, this book is about what it is to be a person, what it is to be rational, what our moral goals should be. 

And it’s a grab bag, like talk about a book you can skip around and like find a middle chapter and just start reading. And he’s very good at giving you these interesting thought experiments and puzzles to think about. And as you try to think about how you would answer it, versus how he answers it, you start to realize something about yourself and you can take it up and put it down. But it’s a really wonderful example. He’s a very important philosopher in the last century, but really wonderful example of somebody who’s just clearly having fun with philosophy. 

The thought experiments, these examples, and puzzles that you think through, or something that you can take and pack away to keep thinking about. If you want an example of a philosopher, clearly at the top of this game and having a blast is Reasons and Persons, it’s a 40-year-old book. It was published in the eighties, but it’s still pretty neat. That book will give you something to talk about.

[01:11:22] Sean: I haven’t read that. I’m really excited to pick that up now. But Meghan, your work, I hope it’s obvious how intrigued I am by you, your thinking, your early work, even in Time Biases, which we didn’t get time to talk about. I would recommend it to listeners, they check that out, your new book out on January 4th, The Good Life Method, anything else you want to leave the listeners with? Of course, we’re going to have it linked up in the show notes, everywhere you can buy it. Anything you want to just leave them with though?

[01:11:44] Meghan Sullivan: I guess the biggest thing that I would hope we would all commit to in the next year. We’re in this period of a lot of change, and we’ve all lived through some episodes recently in our lives that we were not prepared for. And that we’ve never seen anything like this before. I think in 2022, it can be a year for us to really start to understand who we’ve become as a result of all this and who we’d like to be in the chapters that are coming up, and that philosophy doesn’t need to be an intimidating part of that.

It can be just a huge help for everyone. People are meant to reason about these questions. We’re all meant to have philosophy accompanying us as we try to set new goals and try to figure out what we’re really hopeful for again. And I think we all, especially in this coming year, are ready for new goals and a little bit more hope. And I would like to think that this book more specifically, but also just this tradition would be there for us as we start to try to think optimistically about what we’re looking forward to. 

[01:12:48] Sean: It’s a great place to wrap up. Meghan Sullivan, I can’t thank you enough for joining us on What Got You There.

[01:12:52] Meghan Sullivan: Thank you, Sean. That was really fun.

[01:12:55] Sean: You guys made it to the end of another episode of What Got You There. I hope you guys enjoyed it. I really do appreciate you taking the time to listen all the way through. If you found value in this, the best way you can support the show is by giving us a review, rating it, sharing it with your friends, and also sharing on social. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate it. Looking forward to you guys, listening to another episode.