The Sonoran Desert, which covers much of the southwestern United States, is a vast expanse of arid earth where cartoonish entities—roadrunners, tumbleweeds, telephone-pole-tall succulents—make occasional appearances. It was in this iconic, Looney Tunes landscape that dozens of philosophers gathered in the winter of 2022 at a three-thousand-acre dude ranch on the outskirts of Tucson, Arizona, as if inhabiting a thought experiment of their own design. Between archery practice and lassoing lessons, they met in an adobe structure, where there was talk of “inconsistency relations” and “the concept of entailment.” “How does ‘probably’ work?” was unanimously agreed to be one of the more polarizing questions a person could ask.
They were there to attend the Ranch Metaphysics Workshop, an annual conference conceived of nearly twenty years ago by Laurie Paul, a professor of philosophy at Yale University. Paul is the author of “Transformative Experience,” a widely read philosophical investigation of personal change which has been translated into French, Japanese, and Arabic, with German and Mandarin translations in the works. Paul, whose work won the 2020 Lebowitz Prize for philosophical achievement, had selected the ranch for its small dining hall, which she hoped might foster intimate conversation. She wanted the event to combine the rigorous discussion of more typical academic conferences with, as she put it to me, “being kind of nice.” It was an attempt, if only for a few days a year, to socially engineer some of the bullying out of a field infamous for an intellectual aggression so intense that reducing an interlocutor to tears was long considered a mark of successful debate.
“You’re just doing stuff together, and it’s completely separate from the kind of in-your-head activity that philosophy is,” Ned Hall, a philosopher at Harvard University who helped Paul with the workshop’s early iterations, told me. “You’re riding horses! And no one’s any good at it!” Equestrian sport: the great equalizer. (The setting was also an inside joke of sorts about the celebrated philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine, who was known for a minimalist world view that he once described as being similar to a “taste for desert landscapes.”)
“I have a slightly campy side,” Paul, whose strong, symmetrical features made her choice to dress like John Wayne appear elegant rather than foolish, told me. She gestured behind her to a fire pit. Around it were a dozen or so people, many of whom, at Paul’s urging, were also decked out in Western wear. Among them was Ram Neta, a philosopher at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who’d been happy to put on a plaid shirt but had drawn the line, earlier in the day, at a cowboy hat—Paul’s own—which she had playfully placed atop his head prior to his lecture. “Sorry, I can’t do this,” he told the audience, before removing the hat and asking—with the aid of an equation scribbled on a whiteboard—“What are opinions?”
Beyond the ranch loomed a hill where, that morning, José Luis Bermúdez, a philosopher from Texas A. & M. University, had given an outdoor lecture featuring allusions to Shakespeare, Erving Goffman, and an alternate-reality Mycenaean king he called Agamemnon-minus. Getting to the top of the hill had taken about an hour on horseback, and, with the exception of a philosopher from U.C.L.A., who spent the ride explaining black holes to a ranch hand, most of the riders had trotted quietly in single file.
Paul’s work pushes back against a powerful trend in philosophy, which, as it’s practiced today, can at times look more like science than literature. For the past century, one of the field’s aims has been to eradicate vagueness and the inconsistencies that arise when we speak and write—to make language more closely resemble arithmetic. The approach, taken up in Vienna in the nineteen-twenties and thirties and eventually exported to America, augmented speculative, descriptive, and semireligious inquiries with formulas and sprawling mathematical proofs. This relentless, sometimes neurotic-seeming pursuit of clarity has had the ironic effect of rendering much of contemporary philosophy nearly indecipherable to outsiders.
At the ranch, as philosophers herded cattle and drank tequila, Paul and I took a walk through a scrubby expanse. The heels of her black cowboy boots, stepping across the soil, created a dust cloud that obscured her feet. Paul explained that, in her field, first-person experience—“squishiness,” as she put it—typically goes undiscussed. She, however, thought that it could be handled precisely and rigorously, in the same fashion that her colleagues might talk through how many grains of sand constitute a heap. Paul believes that her discipline’s tools can, as she says, “give us a kind of wisdom, and meaning to living,” but she is determined that they not obscure the questions to which they are applied. We are meant to admire statues, after all, not the chisels with which they are carved.
“I just feel that experience has a kind of value,” Paul said hesitantly, as if she believed herself to be saying something controversial. Philosophy tends to attract people who, she said, “like being detached from ordinary life.” A shadow cast by a century-old saguaro cactus flashed across her face. “Whereas I’m totally puzzled and fascinated and disturbed by ordinary life, and I have been since, like, middle school.” It had been about ten years since Paul first asked her colleagues—in a discipline that takes for granted the question of what it might be like to be a bat—to consider what it might be like to be a parent.
“Transformative Experience,” published, like all her writing, under the name L. A. Paul, and released by Oxford University Press in 2014, was her attempt to examine, in roughly two hundred pages, the special types of situations that change not only what we know but also who we are. These transformative experiences provide new knowledge that previously would have been inaccessible to us, and with that knowledge our preferences, values, and self-conception are fundamentally altered. A religious conversion might be an example of a transformative experience. So might losing a limb or taking LSD or going to war. But it was having a child that gave Paul the idea for the book, and, indeed, having a child became its central, if not always explicit, theme.
The book grew out of a working paper, ultimately titled “What You Can’t Expect When You’re Expecting,” that Paul had first presented at a talk two years earlier. In it, she argued that the conventional tools of decision-making do not work when choosing whether to have a child. The “natural approach”—reflecting on what it would be like, appealing to the testimony of other people—was, she argued, insufficient. And no analogous experience (babysitting a niece, say) could ever get you anything but a faulty approximation of the real one. The question of whether to have a child was, for Paul, a sort of riddle that illuminated the limits of rationality. She explored the question through the framework of normative decision theory, whose premise is that we ought to act to maximize expected value, whatever it might be—personal happiness, say, or annual company profits, or a population’s average life expectancy. (The idea’s most elegant encapsulation is Pascal’s wager, which makes the utilitarian case for believing in God: “If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing.”) But such logic, Paul argues, fails in the face of a transformative experience. Choosing to undergo such an experience, on the occasions when choice is even possible, requires us to violate who we take our current self to be. To whom should we have allegiance—the version of ourself making choices, or the version of ourself affected by those choices?
Paul had been living in Canberra, Australia, on a research fellowship at the Australian National University when she had her first child, in January, 2004. Her due date had been in December—summer there—and she spent the last, very hot few weeks of her pregnancy shuffling around the campus at night, often with her husband, the Irish sociologist Kieran Healy. Paul was reading the books she was supposed to be reading to prepare, but she felt alienated by their “cheery assessments” of what pregnancy was like, and she had the impression that, if anything, the books were lulling her into a false sense of control. Once, she became so frustrated that she hurled one of the volumes across the room. A week passed, and then another. When she finally went into labor, a nurse at the hospital asked if she had brought a mirror. Did she want one, to watch the birth as it happened? “I was, like, ‘Um, O.K., sure,’ ” Paul recalled. “But, before, I had been thinking to myself, No, I’m really not interested in seeing a lot of blood.”
Paul said that she had felt like “a medieval machine, a giant wheel cranking and slowly pulling giant heavy doors open.” She was overwhelmed, unable to comprehend what was going to happen. When she had imagined the scene, it had always been in the third person. Now she was that person. “And they just fundamentally conflict,” Paul said. “They’re not the same perspective, and there’s no way for them to come together.” But looking at herself in the mirror giving birth “made the incoherent coherent,” she said. “It broke all the regular ways I previously knew how to make sense of myself.” (Paul has consistently maintained that physically bearing one’s own child, as opposed to adopting one, is not a prerequisite for the epistemic changes that she identifies as most important.)
By the time Paul gave the lecture, in 2012, she was forty-six and had two children in elementary school. “It was pretty amazing to me that philosophers were not talking about this,” she recalled. But a righteous sense that her peers were failing to address the experience of having a child did not quell her anxiety about being the one to do so. “This is going to ruin my career,” Paul remembers thinking. “It’s all going to be over, because here I am talking about babies.”
