Who is Scott Aikin?
I am an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. My work is focused in epistemology, argumentation theory, ancient philosophy, and American pragmatism. I teach a variety of classes, ranging from philosophy of knowledge, to a survey of ancient philosophy, to introduction- and higher-level logic classes, to seminars on skepticism.
The big idea behind a good deal of my work is that reflection on ourselves and our shared lives is a mixed bag. There are occasions for making norms explicit, so we can follow them better, and we can come to understand ourselves in ways that are satisfying. But reflection can get in the way of successful practice, and not just because it delays action. Our reflective results can be weaponized against each other in ways that are pathological. And though our reflection can dispel illusions in our first-order practices, illusions can emerge in our reflection. This collection of thoughts I’ve called, broadly, The Owl of Minerva Problem, which is that wisdom can come only in hindsight – the Owl of Minerva (the representation of wisdom) flies only at dusk.
My recent book with William O. Stephens, Epictetus’s Encheiridion: A New Translation and Guide to Stoic Ethics (2023), is an overview of the core commitments of Stoic ethics, with what we hope is a very accessible translation of Epictetus’s handbook for the good life. Importantly, we give the critics of Stoicism a large voice in the book, with hope we can answer their challenges.
John Casey and I also recently published Straw Man Arguments: A Study in Fallacy Theory (2022). In it, we survey the variety of forms the straw man fallacy can take, ask whether it could also be fallacious to improve an opponent’s view (so, iron man them), and observe that the straw man is a distinct kind of meta-argumentative error, in that the error is in reasoning about reasoning.
My colleague at Vanderbilt, Robert Talisse, and I have co-authored a long list of books and articles with the thought that critical thinking and politics must have a positive synergy. A good explanation for why politics goes badly is because of problems with critical thinking. And vice versa – good reasoning requires appropriate political background. Our books Political Argument in a Polarized Age (2020) and Why We Argue (2019, second edition) are our prime statement pieces of this approach.
