Katherine Hawley, "How to Be Trustworthy" (Oxford UP, 2019)
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What philosophical questions about trust and reliability does the episode introduce?
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Hello, thanks for joining us for this episode of New Books in Philosophy, which is part of the New Books Network. I'm Robert Talise, I'm professor of philosophy at Vanderbilt University. I co-host the program with Carrie Figger, Alexis McLeod, and Sarah Tyson. My guest today is Katherine Hawley. Catherine is professor of philosophy at the University of St. Andrews. Her research focuses on metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics, and in fact she often works at the intersection of these fields. Now her new book is titled How to Be Trustworthy. And it's newly published with Oxford University Press. In our day to day lives, a lot hangs on trust and therefore on whether those around us are trustworthy. But there are several philosophical issues surrounding both trust and trustworthiness.
For one example, just consider Whether trusting someone differs from merely relying on them. We can ask a corresponding question. Ba whether being trustworthy differs from being reliable. Now, assuming that there is a difference between trust and reliable reliability and being trustworthy and being reliable. In what does that difference consist? Во вендр вот рендер собой worthy of our trust. And is trustworthiness always something that's under our control? Now in the book How to Be Trustworthy, Catherine Hawley explores many of these central questions, the questions one might ask when one's thinking through these issues. This is a slim volume. But it's packed with careful and engaged argumentation.
I recommend the book highly. So there's a lot to talk about as there ordinarily is. And as we ordinarily do, let's begin with our guest. Hello, Catherine. Hi, Bob. And how are you today? I'm doing well. How are you? Oh, I'm doing fine, doing fine. Um, why don't you start us off by telling us a little bit about yourself?
Sure, and thanks for having me on the podcast. Um Yeah, so like you said, I'm I'm a professor of philosophy here at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, but I um I'm not a Scot uh by by birth. I was born and I grew up in Stoke on Trent, which is uh a city in the in the West Midlands of England. Um and when I first encountered philosophy as an undergrad student That was not about issues to do with trust or trustworthiness. It was rather in connection with physics, which is what I was mainly studying at the time. So I got interested in questions about um time, space, uh persistence through time, what it is for two objects to be the same as each other or or different. These are kind of metaphysical questions and philosoph philosophy of science questions that um I found I was kinda drawn to from my physics studies, drawn into philosophy and then I kinda never looked back.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What philosophical questions about trust and reliability does the episode introduce?
0:00–10:04
2
How does Katherine Hawley explain the difference between trusting someone and merely relying on them?
10:04–28:59
3
What is the ‘commitment’ account of trust that Hawley proposes?
28:59–50:34
4
How does the book distinguish distrust from simply not relying on a person?
50:34–1:07:47
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from New Books in Philosophy
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