Responsive Openness, Philosophy, Basketball: a Conversation with Drew Hyland

Drew Hyland advocates what he calls a “stance of responsive openness" toward the world.  His key examples of that stance are basketball and philosophy.  Those are forms of play, for Hyland—but play in what sense?  What does it mean to be “open” and “responsive” at the same time?  Can we achieve that even in regard to suffering and death? Is the stance of responsive openness to the world secular, even as it recognizes that the universe is deeply mysterious?  If philosophical questioning will never yield the final answers, why is it worth asking the questions?  Is there a “philosophy of life” that is livable even though its questioning is never-ending? 

Other topics too come up in this wide-ranging conversation, such as the notion of “the ineffable,” the relation between philosophy and art, the distinction between showing and saying something, and the differences between academic philosophy and a philosophy of life.

In response to my concluding invitation to share with the audience several texts or works of art or performances (or combinations of the above) that he thinks are particularly illuminating, Hyland mentions Plato’s dialogues (if you are on an island and can only take one book …), Alvin Ailey’s dance “Revelations,” the collections of poems by Lawrence Ferlinghetti entitled “How to Paint Sunlight” and “These are My Rivers,” and Antonioni’s film “Blow Up.”

For more information about Professor Hyland, please see: https://internet3.trincoll.edu/facProfiles/Default.aspx?fid=1000600

This conversation with Drew Hyland was recorded on June 12, 2025, and has been lightly edited. 

Show notes:

[1] In the course of this conversation, Hyland refers to Frank Deford’s Everybody’s All-American (Grand Central Publishing, 2014); Plato’s Republic book VI (508e ff., on the “The Good”); Plato’s Laws book VII (especially 803a ff., on the contrast between play and war); Plato’s Timaeus 51a-d on the perplexing problem of understanding “chora” (space, place); Robert Pippin’s Philosophy by Other Means: The Arts in Philosophy and Philosophy in the Arts (University of Chicago Press, 2021) with regard to the question of the “ineffable”; and his own “Being a Leaping Spark: Reflections on Teaching” (with regard to what it means to teach philosophy), an essay that is the first chapter in Hyland’s Intimations of Transcendence: Autobiographical Essays in Context (Wipf and Stock, 2025). 

[2] I quote from Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, trans. W. Kaufmann (Random House, 1966; rpt. Vintage Books, 1989), Pt, 1, par. 6, p. 13: “Gradually it has become clear to me what every great philosophy so far has been: namely, the personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir.”  I also referred to Hyland’s essay “On Being a Leaping Spark” (with regard to the original name of the “Skiing and Being” program at Trinity College (CT)).  Some of my thoughts and questions in this conversation grow out of my “Philosophizing with Drew Hyland: the Dialogue Continues,” remarks presented at a Trinity College conference on the occasion of the opening of the Drew Hyland archive at Trinity (October 28, 2022).

I am grateful to Steve Griswold, Betsy Griswold Hansen, Drew Hyland, Annice Kra, Lisa Griswold Robbins, Caroline Griswold Short, and Geoff Griswold Short for their thoughts about this episode, including about the short description thereof and the show notes.

The snippets of flamenco you hear throughout this podcast’s episodes are inspired by, and draw on, not only traditional tropes of the art form but in particular the work of Diego del Gastor (my teacher), Paco de Lucia (everyone’s teacher in modern flamenco), and Luciano Ghosn. 

For more information about where I am coming from in this podcast as a whole, as well as the General Acknowledgments and the Dedication, please see “Philosophy on the Way” at https://griswoldphilosophy.podbean.com/

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