a person DMed me asking "what are your interests in philosophy these days"

I'm stuck in front of my phone waiting for sleep aids to work and wrote a pretty extensive answer. since I'm probably going to get asked this more than once and I definitely don't want to type it a second time, so I think there's usefulness in just reposting my answer here to reference later

in terms of old-philosophy I'm extremely interested in the lives of certain philosophers whose lives speak for themselves. specifically diogenes, epictetus, and marcus aurelius in that order

this is in contrast to the life of say bertrand russell, who I respect intellectually but as a person consider something of a weiner. even when he was imprisoned for civil disobedience he used his connections to be transferred to a cushy prison and he had unlimited access to books from friends and colleagues who would visit him. when Malcolm X went to prison it was for actual armed robbery and he didn't whatsoever have the ability to retain these aristocratic pretensions, and pretensions is a characterization I will stand by

in terms of new-philosophy I'm interested in

- everything having to do with lying and honesty and all mental models relating to that, such as harry g frankfurt's conception of bullshit. the ethics of lying and honesty are something I think about literally every day. if you combined how much an academic selected at random seems to care about animal ethics and/or social justice I think I think about lying and honesty more than both of those subject areas combined. there is a shockingly small amount of literature on it.

- the philosophy of humor. likewise with "small amount of literature" phenomenon

- to a lesser extent the philosophy of sport

very broadly, I guess social epistemology and philosophy of language and the ethics of belief.

I feel like something of a fraud because I don't find the sexy areas that interesting.

contemporary philosophy of mind is can get quite boring to me, likewise with contemporary phil of sci. I can't put my finger on why. it gives me the vibe that people work in these areas as a kind of serious game - which I know could be uncharitably read as oxymoronic but I mean in the sense of say competitive chess - rather than because they care about what happens if they're wrong.

a disproportionate number of philmind guys are on podcasts, who inevitably end up being at the mercy of Podcast Guys, which means they inevitably end up discussing a sigh-causing schedule of beaten-to-death topics that inevitably become intro lectures. this bloodline of topics — AI consciousness + risks + ethics / simulation theory + multiverse theory / cryptocurrency, to name the popular girls at the table — has this led fridmanesque "woah man 🤯" factor that grates on me, in the sense that the novelty is not there at all and I'm totally over it. it really isn't that deep, it's just deep in the sense that - unlike "animal ethics" where a normal person can guess what's under discussion - the framing of the topic "sounds smart" and this means means laypeople think it's off limits to non-smarts.

in other words, I am sick of these topics of discussion in the way that department store workers in December are sick of "let it snow" and "most wonderful time of the year".

metaethics is similar and less something I'm interested in and more something where I just think lots of other people are wrong. so I'm interested in metaethics in the sense that I think lots of other people are just making idiots of themselves but it's not something I'm drawn to talk about naturally, which I feel like a dickwad for saying but which I suppose was wittgentstein's entire attitude toward the philosophy of language so I suppose it's not that weird.

contemporary epistemology is of course inevitable and so I'm not completely uninterested but, likewise, the contemporary work can get so granular that it seems divorced from outcomes with stakes or outcomes that people have skin in the game in. this isn't always the case of course but, like, stuff like gettier problems are annoying as hell to read because they exist in Edgecaselandia and having to work out conditions of justification and implicature and how I feel about noncognitivism and foundationalism and grounding and whether something is "rationally non optional" to do the work I'm trying to do feels like the equivalent of having to read and study both testaments of the christian bible before you can start talking about which charities matter and why and how we should go about charity-ing

it's entirely possible in other words to be a bertrand russell type who is privileged or from a background thereof and caught up in some extremely rabbitholed subdomain of knowledge and logic that will never actually affect how you live or act, or how other people live or act. this existence is in some sense pitiable because some generic tiktok financial advice influencer had changed more real lives than people writing in this niche area, and I'll add that I completely understand why a wittgenstein type might have been "fiery" — because it's real to someone like that, and you get the sense that this... not necessarily isn't real per se but that it's so down its own rabbit hole that if we had gotten lost inside our own assholes we wouldn't - ironically - know.

finally there's a few more entries in the category of "things I'm interested in only because people are wrong and I need to make sure they know why", such as animal ethics which often invokes a style of birdbrained (literally and figuratively) understanding of consciousness, and utilitarianism. while I am a consequentialist and consider myself a falsehood minimalist I do not at all consider myself a utilitarian and think discourse about collective quantified emotions and qalys and utilons is the sort of thing that appeals to people with a borderline childish way of thinking about emotions, in the sense that thinking of "suffering" or especially "happiness" as this singular quantifiable property in the world — especially given how biologically contingent these ideas are and how radically different happiness can be intra-humanity nevermind interspecies — is something that you could only do if you were kind of socially or emotionally stunted. people treat the popularity of utilitarianism with smart tech people as some kind of consensus that it's correct when in fact I see this as reason to believe that it's quite a mid thing, like most forms of libertarianism, where the optimal amount of thinking and reading to reach this point is about two to five popsci nonfiction books with a grade 8-9 flesch kinkaid and a regular dose of podcasts from someone inevitably described as "interesting", like sam harris, listened to with a what-should-we-eat-for-dinner level of commitment during a commute.

in fact my objection is as much philosophical as it is practical, because for in my experience most utilitarians you could take away the utilitarian framework and they'd still be upper middle class / upper class (what I call 'comfort class') white guys and they'd still behave in mostly the same way

so I am "interested in" the animal ethics / metaethics / utilitarianism side of philosophy in a People Are Wrong On The Internet way except instead of the internet it's real life and it has consequences. I'm "interested" in the sense that a janitor is interested in cleaning a gym mirror covered from a chronically-rejected man who took cialis before a date, got stood up, and in a straw/camel/back moment shotgunned 12 beers and firehosed the 72x100 mirror with the remnant nine pounds of liquid from his cialis erection. it's necessary to see clearly but it's hardly an activity I'd do if I didn't think it was something someone needed to do and I didn't have an obligation to do it

this is contra philosophy of humor, which I don't get bored by, and likewise with the philosophical aspects of honesty and deceit — with the exception of those dinky financial game studies in behavioral economics that use low-stakes chump change and attempt to measure honesty through cheating. most of the literature relating to honesty I could read for days and not get bored.

so I guess in asking what I'm "interested in" this is actually several separate categories - what I'm naturally drawn to, what I find rewarding, what I find stimulating, and what I find necessary - and these categories needn't overlap, per the janitor example.