I was interviewed
In this interview, I discuss my background, teaching and research. A great read if you've curious about the (odd) mind of an academic philosopher.
Please like, share, comment, and subscribe. It helps grow the newsletter and podcast without a financial contribution on your part. Anything is very much appreciated. And thank you, as always, for reading and listening.
I was recently interviewed by a Canadian philosopher, Philippe-Antoine Hoyeck, for his Substack, Footnotes to Plato. I am running the interview here because it turned out very good and for the many new subscribers I’ve gotten who are curious about me and my work.
PHIL HOYECK: You’re a philosopher by trade. Suppose you could travel back in time to advise your past self. Would you try to change his decision to pursue philosophy? Why or why not?
JIMMY LICON: No. I’m a philosopher in my bones. However, I would have done it differently: more teaching experience earlier on would have helped, and I should have done a better job turning my dissertation into publications. I made some big mistakes and didn’t handle graduate school stress very well.
I’d also be more strategic about the job market—seeking more feedback on my materials, doing more practice job talks, things like that. I probably would have pursued more formal training in economics too.
PH: You have a pretty wide variety of interests, spanning epistemology, political theory, and the philosophy of religion. How do your views in these areas relate to each other?
JL: One of the major themes in my work is thinking hard about different aspects of cooperation. That always struck me as magic. Why would people cooperate with each other? How do governments and leaders maintain power over populations? Why do people do the right thing when no one else is watching?
It struck me during and after graduate school that many philosophical problems arise from the fact that we are social and coalitional beings—we live with, and we need, other people. From there, many profound ethical and epistemic conclusions follow, with implications in epistemology, political theory, and the philosophy of religion.
PH: You write a lot about religious belief. How would you describe your position in the philosophy of religion and why?
JL: I'm some sort of theist. I was born into an incredibly religious family—think Southern Baptists on steroids. For example, women wearing pants was considered sinful, except in cases like sleepwear or military service. When I was younger, even watching shows like Little House on the Prairie was frowned upon as a seemingly innocent portal to worldliness and sin.
Between the strict rules of the church and the unconvincing answers I got when I asked questions about God or the Bible, I became disillusioned. In high school, it occurred to me that the world would look the same—so I thought—whether or not God existed. I promptly decided there was no God. In my mind, the burden of proof was on believers, and they had fallen far short. So, there was no more reason to believe in God than in Santa Claus.
That attitude persisted until graduate school. Some personal struggles brought home the practical value of religious belief and practice. It was in those moments that I began to understand its importance. And yet, I still couldn’t bring myself to believe that God existed. The evidence seemed better when I re-examined it, but still not convincing.
It was only after a profound experience of God that I realized my mistake. I now believe there is a very powerful and benevolent God—something like the being described by theism—but I’m fuzzy on the details. I recognize that a private religious experience won’t convince others, given its first-person nature, but it was profound and moving. And for people who know me well, it was surprising—the guy who couldn’t bring himself to believe had a profound experience of (seemingly) that very being.
PH: Relatedly, you seem to be more interested in whether we should believe or hope God exists than in arguments that He exists. What explains this approach?
JL: It strikes me as strange that belief would be the default mental unit for religious practice. Even if one is a devout Christian, there are many aspects of the tradition that one must accept on trust rather than evidence. In those cases, hope seems more appropriate. One may not, for example, have enough evidence—personal or public—to believe that Christ rose bodily from the dead, but they may have enough to hope that He did.
And it is not enough to hope Christ rose if that hope doesn’t animate one’s actions. It must be a form of hope that fuels devotion to God, service to others, attending services, and belonging to a religious community.
There’s nothing wrong with relying on hope and trusting the word of others. We do it all the time. When you take a loved one to the doctor to check out a suspicious growth, you’re acting on hope and trust—you hope the doctor can help, and you trust the process. So, one of the things I’m thinking deeply about is what religious practice looks like when grounded in a robust, animating hope rather than in belief.
PH: You also write a lot about politics. Do you think Plato was right about philosophers and that we should have unilateral power over everything? Pretty tempting, no?
JL: It depends on what you mean by philosopher. If you mean people who do philosophy professionally, then hell no. Philosophers are just as susceptible to tribalism, motivated reasoning, and self-deception as anyone else. And nowhere are those forces more powerful than in politics. As I’ve written in both peer-reviewed pieces and Substack posts, politics makes people nasty. I see no reason to think professional philosophers are exempt.
But if you mean people who are genuinely impartial in their application of reason, then we’d probably be without political leadership. The anarchist part of me wouldn’t mind that. Having no political leadership might not be good in the long run—but it’s really hard to know such things in advance.
PH: You’ve touched on political questions from mask mandates to free speech to abortion to polarization and more. What are your main political concerns right now and why?
JL: My primary concern in American politics is the overpowered Executive branch. I thought the Biden administration was constitutionally ghastly, but the Trump administration is doing as badly, if not worse. If people want a king or queen—something I assume would be bad for our freedoms and rights—they should just keep empowering the executive.
Another big concern is tariffs. The problem isn’t just that tariffs are taxes by another name or that they distort markets—it’s that they may force businesses to rethink the value of the American brand. Much of our wealth and quality of life is based on global trust in U.S. markets and leadership. If we act like the regimes we used to criticize, we damage that reputation. And reputational damage is hard to undo. It can take years, even decades.
Our politics now feels purely oppositional: we vote for candidates not because we like them, but because we despise the alternatives. That’s not sustainable. If we don’t change course, we’ll eventually suffer the consequences. We need to remember that the freedoms we enjoy depend on tolerating people who think and act very differently from us
PH: One topic you’ve explored a lot recently is artificial intelligence. What’s your general outlook on AI? Are we hurtling toward a Terminator-style robot uprising?
JL: No. I use ChatGPT and Grok too much to be worried about that—great movies, though! I’m aware of the horror stories and scary scenarios from AI doomers. Maybe AI becomes an existential threat someday, but I’d be surprised if that happens in my lifetime.
If AI leads to our downfall, it will likely be through human misuse. Despite our imaginations, other people—not machines—are still the greatest threat to human beings. Humans can be terrible to each other. That’s not to downplay the benefits AI can offer, but some people—however rare—will have no problem using AI to get what they want by any means necessary. The combination of AI, online anonymity, and psychopaths is a bad mix. I worry about that more than Skynet.
PH: What’s your biggest pet peeve about any aspect of public discourse right now? What, if anything, do you think philosophers can contribute to improving it?
JL: Taxing people’s bullshit.
What do I mean? I mean making people defend their poorly grounded, tribal opinions. Ask hard questions. Push them on dodgy or ambiguous claims. Am I saying be an asshole? No. Time and place matter—maybe don’t interrogate someone’s fear of death at Grandma’s funeral—but there is real social value in philosophers asking what people mean and why they believe it.
And the goal shouldn’t be to push an agenda, as much as to cultivate epistemic humility. Sometimes the truth isn’t productive. But there’s way too much untaxed bullshit in our society, and philosophers are well-positioned to challenge it. We’re supposed to be good at asking hard and illuminating questions. I can’t think of a time when that’s more needed.
PH: What thinkers or works would you say have most influenced your philosophical development? What was it about them that had an effect on you?
JL: Descartes. Darwin. Hayek.
These thinkers taught me how to understand the relationship between complex systems, coordination, and knowledge. I first encountered philosophy through Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy, where he asks how we know we’re not dreaming or being deceived by a powerful demon.
That challenge drew me into philosophy and eventually led me to Charles Darwin, the father of evolutionary biology, and F. A. Hayek, the Nobel Prize-winning economist who helped dismantle the idea of centrally planned economies. From Darwin and Hayek, I came to understand and appreciate how order and complexity can emerge spontaneously—without central planning or intelligence. Things that look designed often aren’t, including biological and social systems.
My research and teaching reflect those insights about the systemic and collaborative nature of knowledge and the social systems that sustain it. That perspective has profoundly shaped my work.
PH: You write an absolutely staggering amount. What’s your secret? Have you cloned yourself? Do you take super soldier serum? I need to know!
JL: Two words: consistency and priority.
The biggest obstacle many people face when not writing is what I call too-busy-itis—the chronic claim that they’re too busy to get anything done. I first noticed this in grad school. Whenever I asked colleagues what they were working on (besides the usual), they’d go on about how busy they were—as a way of explaining why they hadn’t written anything.
At first, I didn’t think much of it. However, as time went on, I kept writing, and kept publishing, and noticed that many of those who complained the most rarely published or went to conferences. Some had kids or major life obligations—fair enough. But others didn’t. And yet they still claimed to be overwhelmed.
Eventually, I realized it was a time-management problem. Those who complained the most were often the worst at structuring their time. If you don’t write with consistency and priority—you won’t write. I write in the mornings, several times a week. I make time for it because it matters.
So here’s my secret: I write consistently. I make it a priority. I submit work I believe in until either (a) it is accepted, or I (b) run out of places to send it, or (c) I stop believing in it.
Do I use LLMs (large language models)? Yes—but mostly for tasks I hate, like proofreading. I don’t want my voice or intellectual life replaced by a machine. ChatGPT is a great assistant, but it’s a terrible philosopher. And that’s fine by me—I’d rather outsource the grunt work so I can focus on the argument and the writing.