He says he's not academically employed for security reasons, which would make research quite difficult. Even without his published research in the field I would probably guarantee you this guy could get a professorship at a prominent university. I even bet there's many schools that would give him one in philosophy/religion/ethics if he wanted it despite the PhD and research being in neuroscience. Arguably he's as published in the philosophy/religion field albeit in a very different manner, his name would get him past most any department standards except at certain places like Harvard. I suspect Jake could guess at all this probability far better than me. As philosophy/religion are just neighbors within our Humanities apartment complex.
i wasn’t gonna post anything in here because the first ~40 or so posts went better than anything I could’ve contributed, BUT since you flashed the bat signal.
Harris is far less published in his purported field than, say, Pinker or Peterson. I’ve heard that his PhD is less than stellar scholarship and in large part a product of connections and family money. Which I don’t think we need to feel any particular way about; terrible research gets produced all the time so this is a case of hating the game not the player, as far as I’m concerned. What we do know for sure is that what he’s gained a following for has been at the expense of mangling interactions/correspondences with people in other fields he likes to pontificate on, mangling arguments/discussions within those same fields, and being not terribly interested in reevaluating his stance when someone points all this out. WRT the rest of the IDW manosphere, Harris’ defining characteristics are: naive act utilitarianism, which he treats as completely self-evident and not actually utilitarianism (though I think he’s inconsistent on this last point); apologia for state interventionism (read: American empire) abroad; the kind of bill Maher smug shoe atheism that was infinitely annoying 5 years ago but in the light of where the Overton windows gone in the meantime now seems quaint; a fixation on the is-ought gap, or, whether normative conclusions can be derived from merely descriptive claims (one of the aforementioned manglings; and a penchant for using bludgeoning rhetoric to belittle and dismiss opponents rather than engage in, wait for it, reasoned argument.
As to why he doesn’t take a job in academia, look at how much his podcast alone makes him. Back when he had a patreon that was getting him hundreds of thousands a month iirc. He still gets invited to a bajillion events/talks/conferences a year where he and Maajid Nawaz, Charles Murray, et al. can sit in armchairs and stare intently at each other while pondering just how fucking smart everyone is, disagreeing only in degree and not kind how badly we need to nuke the Fertile Crescent into glass and bemoan the fact that the university they’re at installed unisex bathrooms. He chose all of that rather than producing actual research. I think that indicates where exactly his priorities lie.
First, his mom created The Golden Girls!!!!!!!!1
i take everything back
