iS BOREDOM A BESTIAL AFFLICTION?

vexistential anxiety when you are 9 or ten

One must imagine Sisyphus…bored ENDLESSLY, CLIMBING THAT HILL

DOES HE EVER GET BORED?

Classic intellectual response pointing to the question rather than answering it

For instance, sometimes at dinner parties, I'll think of references to philosophers or have intellectual points to make, but I hold off from bringing them into the conversation because it feels out of place. Like I don't wanna be that pretentious guy whose shtick is, "yes...Derrida has a view on that.'

And then they start asking you questions about the meaning of life and about the origin of the universe, and ain't nobody got time for that.

interpret it as automatically pretentious. any sort of metric, and culturally legible metric,, you have betrayed your class. Like the, the Gulf is, is quite gigantic.

unapologetically so

Ellie: Do intellectuals have a duty to comment in the public sphere?

Ellie: Do intellectuals have a duty to comment in the public sphere?

] David: Yeah. There is nothing outside of the political world as long as you are a human who is situated in a human world

drama between teachers and students, but it, it also features this kind of academic. Who is disenchanted with the world and feels persecuted by everybody around them

from grad school told me that she would sometimes get into her car and just sit there and wonder why it wasn't moving and then realize that she was sitting in the passenger seat, but she was supposed to be the one driving, which is like an amazing real world example of the absent minded professor stereotyp

epistemic authority

ways about how intellectuals no longer exist in our world because intellectuals have ceased to be committed to that ideal of Disinterestedness and Aloofness, and they have become sort of mired in political controversies that makes them partisans and political agents rather than intellectuals.

Which is not, I think, the case necessarily more generally. But so there's like this default credence that's given, or this default seriousness that's given to your views