4. The Personal Nature of Philosophy with Sanford Goldberg and Crispin Wright

This episode applies the distinction between personal and shared inquiry—developed in the previous episodes—to philosophical inquiry, arguing that philosophy is a personal affair. It sketches a picture of doing philosophy as the activity of creating an equilibrium of philosophical ideas based on personal nodes that are best described as a kind of intellectual tastes. This picture is shown to be superior to the naturalist picture of philosophy—according to which philosophy is a scientific inquiry—because it can explain why philosophers could rationally believe their theories in the face of systemic peer disagreement and why there can be a sense of philosophical progress in spite of such disagreement.