Gloria Origgi, “Reputation: What it is and Why it Matters” (Princeton UP, 2018)
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What is reputation and why do we care about it?
Hi everyone, this is Marshall Poe. I'm the founder of the New Books Network, and I'm also a historian. I used to be a history professor, and I love maps, so I'm especially happy to tell you that this episode is sponsored by What's Your Map, which was the winner of the Best Education Podcast at the 2025 British Podcast Awards. What's Your Map is hosted by historian and prize-winning author Professor Jerry Broughton. In each episode, he invites a guest to share a map close to their heart and unfurl the ideas, inspirations, and stories behind it. I can tell you I've listened and it's fascinating. The podcast is in its sixth series and is enjoyed by audiences around the globe. You can explore all the maps in the podcast online.
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Hello, thanks for joining us for this episode of New Books in Philosophy. I'm Robert Talese. I'm Professor... Hello, thanks for joining us for this episode of New Books in Philosophy. I'm Robert Talese. I'm Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University. I co-host the program with Carrie Figder. She's Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Iowa. My guest today is Gloria Origi. Gloria is Senior Researcher at the National Center for Scientific Research in Paris. Her work focuses broadly on interpersonal relations and the ways in which they are mediated by various social phenomena. Her previous books have been about trust and the Internet. Her latest book is titled Reputation, What It Is and Why It Matters.
It's published with Princeton University Press. Now, we all put a great deal of care into protecting our reputation, but the precise nature of a reputation remains obscure. In one sense, reputation is mere hearsay, a popular perception that may or may not have any basis in fact. Yet we often rely heavily on reputations, for example, when we're choosing a restaurant, a mechanic, or even a physician. And obviously, multiple sites on social media are devoted to helping us discover the reputation of various kinds of service providers. Still, we all know that reputations are manipulable and often are manipulated and manufactured. So one wonders if it's rational to care so much about reputation. Now, as the title of the book suggests, Gloria explores a wide range of philosophical questions about reputations, bringing together the tools of philosophical analysis with work in sociology and psychology.
Orgy presents a complex picture of what reputations are, how they spread, when they're reliable, and how we can know. There's a lot to talk about, as usual. But also, as usual, let's start by greeting our guest. Hello, Gloria. Hello. How are you today? Very well, and thank you for having me. Oh, sure. It's a pleasure. Can you start us off, perhaps, as we normally do, by telling us a little bit about yourself?
Oh, yeah. I mean, I'm a philosopher with a very bad reputation in a sense. I'm an Italian who came to France to study analytical philosophy. So I'm a sort of strange, weird philosophical subject or object with a lot of different... Sort of mixture of things. And so I moved to France almost 20 years ago. But my first book was on Quine, so on American epistemology. And and actually, I think that an important sort of a key moment of my of my intellectual career was the the coming of Internet and the and the and so the late 90s and the beginning of the 2000 in which I was a young researcher and. And I started to be interested in how these new ways of spreading information would act.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is reputation and why do we care about it?
0:00–6:44
2
How does Gloria Origgi define reputation as a social ego?
6:44–15:01
3
Why is trust essential for acquiring knowledge in an information‑rich society?
15:01–21:49
4
How do reputations spread and become viral or fade away?
21:49–29:20
5
What role do reputational tags play in everyday decisions like choosing doctors or restaurants?
29:20–37:34
6
How can reputations be manipulated, and what are real‑world examples?
37:34–44:29
7
When is a reputation reliable and how can we evaluate its credibility?
44:29–53:49
8
What are the next research projects on reputation, status, and social motivation?
53:49–1:00:35
Speakers
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Philippe Huneman, "When Metaphysics Meets Biology: Kantian Approaches to the Concept of An Organism" (Routledge, 2026)
Rivka Weinberg, "The Meaning of It All: Ultimate Meaning, Everyday Meaning, Cosmic Meaning, Death, and Time" (Oxford UP, 2026)
PJ DiPietro, "Sideways Selves Travesti and Jotería, "Struggles Across the Américas" (U Texas Press, 2025)