Jordan Walters is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Oxford. He recently received his PhD in Philosophy from McGill University. 

Link to your Website:https://jdtwalters.weebly.com/

What are you working on right now? 

I’m working on a series of papers about the value of humanity. The first paper examines orthodox accounts of the value of humanity, recent heterodox proposals, and argues that neither can vindicate the intuition that all human beings are born free and equal in dignity. The second paper develops and defends the view that another’s bare humanity suffices to ground their being valuable. The third paper argues that we owe something to the dead themselves. A fourth paper asks how we should balance obligations between past, present, and future generations; I argue that our duties to the dead sometimes trump our duties to future generations. 

If you could be anyone else for a day, who would that be and why?

I’d like to be Bach on the day that he finished composing the Cello Suites. I imagine it would be nice to fall asleep playing them all in my head, knowing, for the first time ever, how it all hangs together.

What books are currently on your ‘to read’ list?

The list is too long. Here are a few that pop out:

What’s your most treasured memory?

After high school, I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life, so I moved out, got a job at a café, and eventually turned my entire apartment into an art studio. I’d stay up late most nights painting—often alone, sometimes with friends—asking questions like: What is art? What’s the point of art? What makes a good painting good? The questions felt impossible to answer, but I remember having so much fun trying to answer them, especially since back then, I didn’t really know what philosophy was, so I was just shooting from the hip. There was a certain kind of naivety to it all.

What time of day are you most productive and creative?

In the morning. But I can’t get much writing done at home. There’s this café around the corner from me in Montreal, and I go there pretty much every day to read and write. I’ll usually get a coffee and a croissant, sometimes feed a bit to the pigeons, and before I know it, I’ve got some words on the page. If I’m lucky, I’ll get to leave some of the words there the next day.

Which superpower would you like to have?

I have this somewhat irrational fear of forgetting everything I’ve ever read, so I wish I could remember it all, kind of like Funes in that wonderful story by Borges, but perhaps that would be awful in its own way.

What’s your favorite quote?

I love this passage from Robert Nozick’s Philosophical Explanations:
“Wouldn’t it be better if philosophical arguments left the person with no possible answer at all, reducing him to impotent silence? Even then, he might sit there silently, smiling, Buddhalike. Perhaps philosophers need arguments so powerful they set up reverberations in the brain: if the person refuses to accept the conclusion, he dies.”

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