Peter Boghossian is an American philosopher who served as an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Portland State University for ten years.
His academic focus spans atheism, critical thinking, pedagogy, scientific scepticism and the Socratic method.
Peter has a great YouTube channel where he interviews college students and hosts a podcast.
Quick background
Peter, known for his critique of contemporary academia, left his university position in 2021, citing the stifling effects of cancel culture.
His departure followed his involvement in a very funny peer review prank where he and his colleagues submitted absurd papers to academic journals to expose the flaws in the peer review process.
This event, known as the ‘Grievance Studies Affair,’ highlighted the ideological corruption in academic publishing.
He has authored several books including A Manual for Creating Atheists and How to Have Impossible Conversations, which challenge conventional thought and encourage critical discourse.
The latter book had a profund impact on me, ending up forming the foundational structure of my interviews in the following years.
Peter has also been a vocal critic of cancel culture, correctly arguing that it suppresses free speech and academic freedom, ultimately harming intellectual diversity.
He’s absolutely correct.
The entire system—academia, government and media—is broken.
Conversation
I’ve read his book—How to Have Impossible Conversations—a few times and highly recommend it due to its constructive methodology based on ancient Greek philosophy (especially that of Socrates).
We live in a strange, postmodern world where everything is inverted, objectivity is subjective, feelings matter more than reality, men can be women, words don’t mean anything and everything is relative.
It’s become a clown world.
What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.
Salman Rushdie, British-Indian novelist
