C. Thi Nguyen - This conversation will change how you see the world

There is something irresistible about the way C. Thi Nguyen thinks about and structures the world. From the lenses of trust, art, games, and communities he thinks about seemingly everything. In each of these topics, he's written pieces that I consider to be among the most important works on them.

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Thi is professor of philosophy at the University of Utah focusing on the ways that our social structures and technologies shape how we think and what we value. He's known in and beyond philosophical circles for his ideas and writing. He's published on trust, expertise, group agency, community art, cultural appropriation, aesthetic value, echo chambers, moral outrage porn, games, and much more. You will find many of his articles among Philosopher Annual's top ten best articles of the year (in 2019, in 2020, in...you get the picture).

In 2021 he published his first book, the exceptional Games: Agency as Art, which was awarded the American Philosophical Association 2021 Book Prize and established Nguyen as one of the great philosophers of games. In it he outlines how games are a distinctive form of art and a form unto themselves because what they manipulate is our agency--what we do, how we do it, why we do it. Some of his work since has thought about places where gamification shows up in our society, like the gamification of communication on Twitter--one of those 'best of the topic' pieces I mentioned.

So this is a conversation about philosophy but it is one grounded in our society and our communities. It is also a conversation about the epistemology, the process of making knowledge, of one of our great modern philosophers. To listen to Thi is to learn deeply about our own processes of making knowledge and sense in the world—one rich with frameworks and ideas and wisdom—it is intellectually exhilarating and a delight.

Both emotions were present as we welcomed him to Origins.