Quassim Cassam, "Vices of the Mind: From the Intellectual to the Political" (Oxford UP, 2019)
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What is the book “Vices of the Mind” about and why was it written?
Hello and thank you for joining us for this episode of New Books in Philosophy, which is part of the New Books Network. I'm Robert Talis, I am Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University, and I co-host the program with Carrie Figder, Alexis McLeod, and Sarah Tyson. My guest today is Kasim Kasam. Kasim is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warwick. His research specialization is epistemology, broadly construed to include issues concerning self-knowledge, self-awareness, as well as epistemic virtues and vices. He's also interested in topics in what has come to be called social and political epistemology. His new book brings together many of these interests. It's titled Vices of the Mind, From the Intellectual to the Political.
It's just been published by Oxford University Press. Now, sometimes people are blameworthy or otherwise not admirable because of what they believe. But sometimes they're blameworthy or otherwise not admirable because of how they believe, that is, for how they think, their ways of gathering evidence or inquiring, managing information, engaging with interlocutors, and so on. Hence we sometimes criticize others for being careless, dogmatic, gullible, and so on, quite independently of what we might think of what we might call the content of what they believe. Now, in many contexts, these evaluations have the form of appraisals of the person to whom they are applied. So, just as we might speak of intellectual virtues,
We can also speak of intellectual vices. In Vices of the Mind, Kasim Kasam develops a conception of intellectual or what might be called epistemic vice, and he explores the places where these vices occur, where they appear, and where they flourish and thrive. The result is a fascinating examination of the ways in which individuals' flawed ways of thinking Can impact others and indeed the world. So there's a lot to talk about as there normally is. But let's begin with our guest. Hello, Kasim. Oh hi, Paul. How are you today?
Uh I'm very well, thank you. How are you?
I'm doing fine. Um, wanted to start us off uh by telling us a little bit about yourself.
Uh so I I was born in uh Mombasa in Kenya and um I was raised uh by a mother who was a devout Ismaili Muslim and a father who was a devout Marxist. Uh uh strange combination. Uh well, my father I think won the battle for my teenage soul. And when I was eleven he gave me a book by an American Marxist called Leo Huberman. uh as well as the selected works of Marx and Engels. Uh I don't really know how much of that I took in, but I certainly spent my teens reading Marxism. Uh and by the time I was about sixteen, I thought that my understanding of Marx would be deepened by uh knowledge of political philosophy. So I then read uh Plato, Hobbes, Locke, Russo uh and others. Um, but I still thought that Marxism and political philosophy were were really what I was interested in.
And so I applied to do a a degree at Oxford called P P E, which is philosophy politics. And economics. Um and in those days you had to take a series of exams to get in, and I still remember those exams and remember some of my answers, every one of which was staunchly Marxist. Uh so when I got to Oxford A couple of things happened. I mean the first was that I actually studied Marxism as part of my degree. And found myself much less convinced by Marx than I had been as a teenager. Uh and at the same time, although I remained very interested in political philosophy, I also started to read uh analytic philosophy or analytic epistemology, analytic metaphysics. And a turning point for me was when I read um a book by Peter Strawson called Individuals.
uh which was uh um had had a huge impact on me. And from that moment on, I think I started to do much less political philosophy and much more work on on Kant and Strawson. Um so in a way my work now uh which is which is becoming more political Um, which I think surprises some people from from my own point of view, it's actually Going back to my my intellectual roots and some of the issues that I was exercised by
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