Interviste

1. Professor Maudlin, thank you very much for accepting our invitation for this interview. I'd like to start with your first approach to philosophy. You studied at Yale University and you earned your Ph.D. in 1986 from the University of Pittsburgh. How has philosophy influenced your studies?

TM: There are several characteristics of a philosophical training that one tends not to get anywhere else. The most important is strict attention to the precise meanings of terms and to the conceptual resources being used. Since philosophy often has nothing to rely on except abstract argumentation, one becomes sensitive to both fine gradations in meaning and to hidden premises (or outright invalidities) of arguments. Another aspect of philosophy that is useful for foundational work in physics is the skill of close reading and the habit of going back to original sources. Physicists often do not know the historical origins of the theories they learn from textbooks and are even positively misinformed about them. They often also pick up the habit of just attending to the equations in papers and skipping the prose, whereas the prose is where the exact significance of the equations is addressed. Finally, philosophy is the search for foundational principles, and always tries to look deeper into things if possible. It is not satisfied with mere pragmatic success unaccompanied by understanding. Physicists are often trained to be satisfied with that, hence the slogan "Shut up and calculate".