These sorts of profiles often include what the subject ate at lunch with the writer. That narrative crutch isn’t available to me, because when I reached out to Massimo Pigliucci, he told me that, yes, he’d be happy to meet at 12:15 p.m., but sorry, it couldn’t be over lunch. Near the end the interview, I learned why: He was fasting that day as part of his Stoic practice.
A professor of philosophy at City College of New York, Pigliucci has become something of the academic face of Stoicism. His latest book, How to Be a Stoic (Basic Books), grew out of a New York Times op-ed that went viral, and he’s a frequent citation in the popular press on the topic. He certainly doesn’t hide his love of the ancient philosophy: When I met him at his office in downtown Manhattan at the CUNY Graduate Center, where he also teaches, I noticed a large tattoo on his left arm of a Stoic emblem and the phrase hic et nunc: here and now.
Contra the modern usage, ancient Stoicism called for something closer to equanimity toward that which we can’t control, not grim emotionlessness toward everything. The philosophy has had a yearslong bubbling up, inching toward a fad. The New Yorker has covered Epictetus, a slave-turned-Stoic philosopher; Ryan Holiday, a former marketing executive, has written multiple best sellers promoting a modernized version, which Quartz called “life hack Stoicism”; Sports Illustrated ran a piece calling the football coaches Bill Belichick and Nick Saban “stoics.” Pigliucci’s book, though blurbed by Holiday, is a healthy counterweight, a more sedate tract that probably won’t be read by football coaches.
Despite what one might assume about a man who earned three doctorates in 14 years, Pigliucci is far from a cloistered intellectual. Since 2010 he has published three books; run Footnotes to Plato, a general philosophy blog, and How to Be a Stoic, a blog that predated the book of the same name; participated in two dozen hourlong videos on the website BloggingHeads; co-created a popular podcast on science and rationality called Rationally Speaking; created Scientia Salon, a short-lived online magazine covering philosophy and science; and even appeared on The Colbert Report to argue that psychopathic lesbian robots didn’t pose a real risk to the fake-conservative host. (Watch the segment.)
Pigliucci, who grew up in Rome, took a circuitous route to the City University of New York. After earning a doctorate in genetics from the University of Ferrara in 1989, he looked for academic opportunities in the United States, eventually finding Carl Schlichting, an assistant professor at the University of Connecticut who was studying the same thing as Pigliucci, gene/environment interaction. The catch was that Schlichting, being only an assistant professor, didn’t have the money to pay for a postdoc. So he offered an unusual deal to someone who’d recently finished his Ph.D.: Come aboard as a Ph.D. student. As Pigliucci recounts it in an interview on the SCI PHI podcast, Schlichting argued, “An American degree will be significantly helpful, and we can give you a special deal: You’ll teach less, do more research, and we’ll pay a little bit more.” Not to mention, “Basically you can come in and do whatever you want.” And so came the second doctorate, this time in biology.
Despite earning three doctorates in 14 years, Pigliucci is far from a cloistered intellectual.
After a postdoc at Brown University, Pigliucci was hired as an assistant professor at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, receiving tenure in 1998. This is where most academic origin stories end. But Pigliucci was by then starting to feel restless. Around the same time arrived Jonathan Kaplan, an assistant professor of philosophy. he had just received his Ph.D. from Stanford, studying Pigliucci’s specialty, nature versus nurture, but from the philosophy side. The two discussed their work, and Pigliucci, going through something of an early-life crisis, decided that he wanted to study philosophy further. After approval from the dean, one of the stranger possible academic arrangements began: A tenured professor studying for a Ph.D. at night school at his own university, with an assistant professor five years his junior as his mentor.
He got the degree but continued to work as a biologist, at Stony Brook University, for five more years, before finally making the jump to CUNY’s Lehman College in 2009 as a professor of philosophy.
Philosophy is in a tight spot. The Stone, a philosophy blog at The New York Times, produces plenty of hits, and philosophers are some of the most notable commenters on trendy topics like effective altruism and the “singularity.” But philosophy departments have been as susceptible to budget cuts as the other humanities. Pigliucci’s cramped, windowless office certainly isn’t much of an ivory tower.
Philosophers interested in the health of their field have little choice but to promote it and themselves publicly, and Pigliucci has distinguished himself by actually having a public. Scientia Salon, which covered fairly dense topics, averaged more than 80,000 views a month. Rationally Speaking is in the top 75 of iTunes science podcasts. Pigliucci, who doesn’t look the part of the crusty professor — in addition to the tattoo, he sports a stud earring — was one of dozens of speakers at a 12-hour “Night of Philosophy and Ideas” at the Brooklyn Public Library, an event that attracted 7,000 attendees.
This drive toward reaching the public started from a young age. One Sunday in his teenage years, Pigliucci was staying with his father, who was busy listening to a soccer game on the radio. Desperately looking for something more interesting, he browsed his father’s bookshelf. Inside a boxed collection of classics, he found the autobiography of Bertrand Russell, an academic philosopher devoted to political activism who was once imprisoned for pacifist protest during World War I. Pigliucci says of Russell: “This was a time when I was beginning to study philosophy. I had this wonderful teacher, I was moving from Catholicism to agnosticism and then atheism, and then Bertrand Russell comes up and shows me that philosophy is more than just arid and difficult-to-understand books. That was a major, literally life-changing influence.”
Even before he became a philosopher, Pigliucci took the importance of public activism to heart. In 1997 he started “Darwin Day” at the University of Tennessee, an event designed to protest a state bill that would prohibit public schools from teaching evolution as a fact. (The bill was eventually defeated.) This was an early step in his involvement in the skeptical movement, an umbrella term that includes atheists, promoters of science education, and attackers of pseudoscience movements like creationism. Along with the aforementioned podcast, he wrote for Skeptical Inquirer, and debated Christian philosophers like William Lane Craig and young-earth creationists like Duane Gish.
But his membership in that community eventually soured. “I thought I was observing symptoms of exactly the kinds of things skeptics themselves were complaining about. Closure to criticism from the outside, even from the inside,” Pigliucci says. When he gave a speech at the Northeast Conference on Science and Skepticism a few years ago, a strange thing happened. “I literally saw people getting up and leaving as soon as I got on the stage. My friends told me they heard comments like ‘Here comes the philosopher.’ … That doesn’t seem like open-mindedness to me, especially considering ‘the philosopher’ is also actually a scientist.” Those kinds of experiences, as well as public blog-brawls with other skeptics like PZ Myers and Jerry Coyne on how accommodating the movement should be to religion (in which, it should be said, Pigliucci often gave as good as he got), led to disillusionment. (It’s telling of the present vitriol that, in a community that supposedly valorizes science and knowledge, Pigliucci was sometimes derided as “Dr. Dr. Dr.” or “Dr.3”)
Since then he has moved on to studying and advocating stoicism, and a longtime reader can’t help thinking that a passage from Epictetus on responding to criticism, quoted in How to Be a Stoic, is not a coincidence: “Stand by a stone and slander it: what effect will you produce? If a man then listens like a stone, what advantage has the slanderer?” You could find worse advice for surviving on the internet.
The day after I talked with Pigliucci, the American Philosophical Association released a “statement on valuing public philosophy.” It said, among other things, that “the APA encourages institutions to develop standards for evaluating and practices for rewarding public philosophy in decisions regarding promotion, tenure, and salary, so that faculty members who are interested in this work may … pursue it with appropriate recognition and without professional discouragement or penalty.” While obviously not aimed at Pigliucci himself, it felt like fitting timing as intellectuals like Pigliucci and outlets like The Stone show that philosophy still holds value to the general public.
Despite his unique background and public presence, Pigliucci is not a star within the academy, and his papers aren’t terribly well cited. Even his friend and longtime BloggingHeads partner Daniel Kaufman, a philosopher at Missouri State University, is at pains to say, “Massimo is not a leading figure in any technical field of philosophy.” But Kaufman doesn’t mean that as a criticism. He says philosophy needs public intellectuals like Pigliucci more than it needs “one more technical philosopher writing one more set of papers that no one’s going to read other than other technical philosophers.”
Back in his office, Pigliucci reflected on his sometimes awkward place in academe: “A lot of philosophers are inherently suspicious of anything that smells like science. Then, on the other side of the divide, I have a lot of friends or colleagues like Neil deGrasse Tyson, for instance, who explicitly says philosophy’s a waste of time.” Pigliucci has defended philosophy from attacks by prominent science advocates like Tyson, Stephen Hawking, and Bill Nye. He co-edited a forthcoming volume debating “scientism,” the idea that scientists can be too smitten with their own ability to explain the world. Kaufman, reflecting on this, offers an interesting inversion of Pigliucci: “Not only can he correct the philosophers when they’re playing science wrong, but he can correct the scientists when they get the philosophy wrong.”
For now, Pigliucci is happy promoting Stoicism. An animated, persuasive conversationalist, he explained how his fasting is part of a practice of self-denial. He emphasized that he would fast only until dinner, after which he’d allow himself a simple meal of soup and bread, and that, really, food tastes much better after two days of this routine.
But public outreach can do only so much. After our interview, I headed out for pizza.
Jack Meserve is the managing editor at Democracy: A Journal of Ideas.
Correction (11/27/2017, 12:45 p.m.): This article has been updated to correct a misspelling in the Latin phrase “hic et nunc.”
