Writing Philosophical Fiction

A conversation with novelist Tina Lee Forsee on thought experiments and the relevance of philosophy

Romaric: Thank you for accepting my offer of an interview. Would you mind introducing yourself, your reason for doing philosophy, and the question(s) that interest you?

Tina Lee Forsee

: I guess I would consider myself more of a writer than a philosopher since I spent most of the past decade working on a novel, A Footnote to Plato, though you probably wouldn’t realize it from my Substack, where I tend to write more about philosophy. But don’t hold me to it! You never know what I’ll write about next.

My philosophical background is unconventional in that I have had virtually no exposure to analytic philosophy. A bazillion years ago, I moved from the midwest to a tiny, Shaker-village-like campus in Vermont, a place called Marlboro College which no longer exists. There I pursued something like a Great Books education and ended up falling in love with the Platonic dialogues and other Plato-leaning philosophers such as phenomenologist Edmund Husserl, and even Heidegger to some extent. I wrote a pretentiously-titled thesis, A Reconciliation of Science and Religion, in which I advocated for a teleological understanding against the Cartesian approach to the mathematization of nature—which is still very much in vogue today, I think, even amongst those who criticize Descartes.

Lately I’m finding myself turning to more contemporary issues in philosophy of mind, but because these are largely discussed in analytic terms, I sometimes feel like a first-year student again. And it’s not just the word math. For the life of me I can’t figure out why everyone’s making such a big deal about qualia when there’s so much more to be said—so much more that has already been said—about experience, or why people find the literal-minded and at times downright ungenerous picking apart of thought experiments so captivating. A part of me wants to go back to burying my nose in the Timaeus, back to that sense of wonder I felt when I first fell in love with philosophy. But another part of me wants to jump in the ring, even if I don’t stand a chance.

Aside from that I’m very slowly working on a second novel about a guy whose body is found on a Tucson service road and an autopsy reveals he never had a brain. The first chapter has been published at Daily Philosophy as a short story: A Not Very Philosophical Zombie.

Romaric: Before we get into more philosophical discussions, would you mind telling us more about your first novel, A Footnote to Plato, what it is about and what kind of questions you raised in it? What was your path to writing that novel like?

Tina: I’ll start with the second question, since it leads into the first: the path was long. The story takes place in 2012-13, when I started writing it, but wasn’t published until 2023. That’s a decade of my life spent on this thing! The novel was also long in a metaphorical sense because all along I felt unsure of what I was doing. Once I became clear on one thing, everything else had to be altered. Every detail seemed ruthlessly interlocked with every other, like some impossible Rubik’s cube. 

One problem was the commitment I’d made in the story’s setup to respect a certain realism about the attitudes of that era. This hinged on real life changes to sexual misconduct guidance, changes which might seem benign to many today, but which struck me as extraordinarily biased, so much so at first I didn’t think I was reading them right. And keep in mind, back then (2012-13) most people outside academia hadn’t even heard of Title IX, or at least these issues weren’t being broadly discussed. So here I was thinking I would expose something that I thought would be quite alarming, at least to academics, though admittedly not of seismic importance in the grand scheme of things. Little did I know the MeToo movement was just around the corner. Honestly, had I known, I might have abandoned the project. The back cover copy reveals why: 

Philosophy professor Dr. Isaac Fischelson finds himself embroiled in a student drama that leads to a false accusation of sexual harassment and an investigation intended to force him out. He faces a disgraceful end to his long career unless he retires immediately. But Dr. Fischelson refuses to be, as his students like to say, an epic failure.

Can you imagine something like this getting published shortly after the Harvey Weinstein accusations? It’s not just vaguely philosophical and therefore unmarketable, it’s also oh so cancelable.

But of course the novel wouldn’t be worth writing or reading if it were just about campus politics. At its heart is the question: What makes life worth living? Or: What really matters? It’s a question that sounds silly when it’s posed in such an open-ended way, but it becomes less abstract and, I think, more interesting, when posed by an aging philosopher who reaches the end of a sleepy career and finds he isn’t the renowned Plato scholar he’d always thought he’d be. Now his reputation is on the line. But what reputation? He might as well just fade away. But then what was the point of it all?

In the background there’s a sort of Plato-Socrates bromance between the professor and a coke-dealing math student who would have thrived in Plato’s Academy had he been a man of leisure in ancient Athens in the fourth century BCE. There’s a fairly large cast of characters (another thing I might not want to do again), with the main characters representing different segments on the divided line—or cave allegory, if you prefer—in Plato’s Republic. But since this is a novel, they’re all in motion, and they each have their own problems and answers to the thematic question.

Romaric: It looks like you finished your novel at the worst possible time. I know how that feels. Those moments are also very interesting. There are a lot of people, online or not, who can easily explain that success—whatever that means—depends on you. There are good reasons for saying that, be it pedagogical or psychological, but in real life that is only a small part of the story. The fact that we are contextually inscribed beings also implies that in some cases there may be good and bad contexts for accomplishing a particular thing. This, of course, raises the importance of contexts in creation. Some philosophers take the position, which is probably a kind of necessary belief for them, that the context of creation is not important. For them, not only is the context in which you write not really important, but when you read a great philosopher, understanding his or her context is secondary, if not irrelevant. As a writer, what do you think about such positions and how it relates to the way you read and write?

Tina: Interesting question! I guess I’d say…it depends on the context. When I’m writing fiction, there’s something like a writer’s instinct involved here, so it’s hard to say what goes on in my head. I just focus on my ideal reader and keep chugging along.

As far as reading goes, I do think there’s something to be gained by taking a work on its own terms, and with a good measure of generosity. When we pick up a book and start reading, we automatically assume the work should in some sense transcend its creator and circumstances. This attitude is similar to the way we suspend disbelief whenever we sit down to watch a movie; you can’t experience the movie the way it was meant to be experienced if you’re constantly thinking everything you’re watching is a lie or unreal. You have to accept fiction as truth to understand fiction at all, and the same holds for reading philosophy or mathematical equations or a recipe for guacamole. All great works were written by real flesh and blood people, people who spend forever on the toilet scrolling their social media, people who talk with their mouths full or some such thing, and that’s disappointing. Any acquaintance with the flawed human being threatens to contaminate, if not destroy, the whole purpose and pleasure of witnessing the creative act—and this isn’t fair to the work. How anyone manages to transcend their own flesh and blood disappointing-ness through art is one of life’s great mysteries, and a large part of me wants that to be preserved.

On the other hand, there’s a danger in ignoring the context. Of course it’s important to know Heidegger was a Nazi and Aristotle was a ‘proto’ racist, but it can be important to know the greater context for the sake of understanding the work. For instance, Alcibiades is not just a character in Plato’s Symposium, but also, during his time, an insanely famous (or notorious) and charismatic political figure. If any individual can be blamed for the destruction of the Athenian empire (big if), then that individual would be Alcibiades. (Some have compared him to Trump, but I don’t know if I’d go that far, especially since Alcibiades was said to have been very handsome.) So if you’re reading the Symposium and you don’t know anything about Alcibiades and you get to the part near the end of the dialogue where he crashes the drinking party and starts competing with the other partygoers to sit closer to Socrates, you might appreciate the humor in that moment, but if you don’t know that in a year’s time from when the story takes place Alcibiades will persuade the Athenians to embark on the disastrous Sicilian expedition—and the night before he’s supposed to set sail to lead that expedition he’ll be accused of desecrating these phallic religious statues called hermai, but rather than stand trial he’ll flee to Sparta where he’ll sleep with Spartan king’s wife and then run off to Persia and so on—you’ll miss the crucial thing about that scene in the Symposium, which is that Socrates might have saved Alcibiades—and therefore, perhaps, even Athens itself—had he been able to turn the young man around. His fault was not the corruption of the youth, as his accusers will later say, but a failure to persuade. For as much as Alcibiades admired Socrates, he wasn’t willing to forgo the glorious path that his privilege and fortune had set out for him. For a young man of his talents and ambitions and connections, that life was just too tempting and easy. The nostalgic bittersweetness of this scene and the sense of missed opportunity would be obvious to Plato’s contemporaries, but not necessarily to us. So yeah, context.

Romaric: In the novel you are currently writing, you draw a character who has no brain. Also, in one of your posts you explain Descartes’ discussion of a piece of wax. What is the place of the thought experiment in philosophy for you, and do you think it plays a similar role in literature? 

Tina: The thought experiments I encountered in my education came up organically from reading the so-called Continental philosophers, but I hadn’t even heard of the phrase ‘thought experiment’ back then, believe it or not, and I didn’t encounter any of the popular ones people talk about today (philosophical zombies, Mary’s room, Chinese room, etc.) until much later. Maybe this is why I don’t tend to see thought experiments as arguments, but as intuition pumps or illustrations that help us understand a problem by framing it in a certain way, often by taking a concept to its extreme.

It’s interesting how a well thought out thought experiment can capture the public’s imagination and set a philosopher apart. Of course, philosophers are notorious for being incomprehensibly abstract (I wrote about this in A letter to my favorite philosophers), so when they finally do give readers something concrete to chew on, readers tend to remember it. Stop someone on the street and ask what they know about Plato and they’ll likely bring up the cave allegory. Why? Because we crave narrative. Thought experiments give us that link from the abstract to the particular, and from here we can begin to see the rudiments of a story. Who doesn’t feel sorry for poor Mary sitting in her colorless room? Imagine the outrage she would feel when she steps outside and realizes the evil scientists have been depriving her of colors all her life! 

As the Substack manager for

After Dinner Conversation - Philosophy | Ethics Short Story

, I see thought experiments turned into stories all the time. Writers interested in doing this tend to gravitate towards Sci-Fi or Fantasy, since these genres allow you to take ideas to the extreme. But philosophical problems take place in our mundane, ordinary lives too, whether we realize it or not. I can’t imagine I’ll ever get tired of the everyday, even while exploring the hard problem of consciousness. And I just want to say—let’s not forget philosophical westerns! There’s nothing quite like a well-wrought, character-driven western to bring to life a moral dilemma.

Romaric: When I was a teenager, I really enjoyed reading science fiction or novels for the speculative experiences they could provide. Although I no longer have the time to read fiction on a regular basis, I think there are important philosophical insights in such stories. But there are those who doubt the importance of philosophy and literature in our everyday lives. For you, who have written both fiction and philosophical texts, what is the purpose of philosophy and literature in our time?

Tina: There’s a lot to unpack here. I’ll start with philosophical fiction, since I have a quick answer to that: it’s very niche and always has been, just like philosophy. For me, it illustrates how philosophical ideas can make an impact in ordinary life. Whereas the purpose of literature is a broader exploration of the complexities of the human condition in all vastness and never-ending variety. No amount of online reading can speak to our emotional and spiritual selves the way sitting down with a great novel can.

As for philosophy, people who don’t see its importance won’t bother to say so, because why should they? That’s what you’d expect of someone who really does find it irrelevant. I have sympathy with that attitude, actually. If you don’t need it in your life, that’s fine. Usually it's only during rough times that people look for answers beyond common sense. For this, they generally turn to religion or spirituality, not philosophy. And yet we live in a secular age, supposedly, so presumably there are people out there who for one reason or another don’t see religion or even spirituality as a ‘live option’, and I wonder whether these people are being left out to dry. That’s something contemporary philosophers might want to pay more attention to. Maybe there’s not as much interest as I think, I don’t know, but I imagine they’re out there gobbling up schlocky self-help books because philosophers don’t know how to talk to them. I can’t say I know how to talk to them either, but I think it’s worth a try. 

The problem is, our all-pervasive ‘science-y’ culture is powerfully persuasive, yet it’s not much of a worldview, is it? And by the time it trickles down to the public it’s positively anemic—“I believe in science” just about sums it up. With nothing to fill in the gaps, we’re left with a pessimism bordering on nihilism. This isn’t supported by science itself, of course, because it can’t be. I think some people would be glad to hear that, yet there are many people out there who are still adamantly and dogmatically gung ho for scientism, and they’re not always obvious about it. That’s why I spend so much time taking apart the arguments of those who confuse science for metaphysics—because it really isn’t. And that’s good news.

Romaric: Thank you very much. I really enjoy this interview with you; I find interesting what you said and the way you explain it. But I am not surprised, because I also enjoy reading your posts on a regular basis. For me, your Substack is a good example of how philosophy and fiction can nourish each other, leaving aside the technical terminology that we, academic philosophers, tend to rely on (probably too much).