Whom do you read even though you disagree with them?
Originally asked
Vox, to writers and thinkers, 9 Questions, 2017
Vox used this as one of nine fixed questions in its 2017 series on intellectual habits.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
Recorded
Kwame Anthony Appiah
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said elsewhere, not written here
Frank Henderson Stewart is a very distinguished scholar, now retired, an expert on the ancient Near East, but he thought deeply about honour. He read ancient texts and legal documents because, as you know, honour is a legal concept in German law and you can seek to have your honour protected in various ways – it’s sort of what they have instead of libel. Analysing and thinking deeply about it, he tries to understand how honour developed, and it was he who led me to see the core thought, which is that honour is an entitlement to respect, and that what honour codes do is say how you get to be entitled to respect. I disagree with a lot of what he says – in particular that he wants to give up on honour because it has such negative connotations: I think it needs reform as a concept – but I think it’s a very lovely piece of scholarly analysis.
Five Books interview, published transcript
source ↗
Writers we think are all wrong and want to read anyway come in two kinds: those who are good writers and bad thinkers — Christopher Hitchens, Norman Podhoretz, and Gore Vidal, each in his terribly different way, are instances of that — and those who may not be original stylists but who we admire for trying to be better thinkers than they were before, stumbling toward truth from a starting place very different from the one we happened to inherit. I disagree, for instance, with David Frum about almost everything, from Iraq to the legacy of Pierre Trudeau in our native Canada, but never doubt his integrity or desire to tell the truth about the world.
Recorded
Sean Illing, Vox, “9 questions” series, 16 September 2017
source ↗
Fareed Zakaria
Journalist and author; host of CNN’s Fareed Zakaria GPS
The Wall Street Journal editorial page, most of the time an intelligent and essential voice in American political life.
Recorded
Sean Illing, Vox, “9 questions” series, 20 May 2017
source ↗
Lisa Randall
Professor of theoretical physics at Harvard University
I read the New Yorker film critic Anthony Lane. Don’t always agree with his opinions on movies but he’s always deadly funny.
Recorded
Sean Illing, Vox, “9 questions” series, 10 June 2017
source ↗
Even though I’m not a utilitarian, and so I tend to disagree with Singer in terms of the general framework, this book literally changed my life. I read it many years ago, in the 1990s, when I was in Knoxville, Tennessee.
Recorded
Nigel Warburton, Five Books interview, published transcript, 2 October 2022
source ↗
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