The Philosopher Who Stopped Philosophizing: On Peter Boghossian
A former colleague and Iranian refugee reflects on why Peter Boghossian traded the uncertainty of the Socratic method for the certainty of the culture war.
I need to declare my position at the outset, because it matters for everything that follows.
I am a professor of educational leadership and policy at Portland State University. Peter Boghossian spent a decade teaching philosophy down the hall from me before resigning in 2021 and denouncing the institution as irredeemable. I am an Iranian refugee who arrived in the United States via Pakistan and Vienna during the upheavals of the 1980s. Boghossian now regularly invokes the suffering of Iranian women under compulsory hijab as ammunition in American culture-war disputes. And I am a philosopher of education, in the same field in which Boghossian earned his doctorate, from the same university, and I have spent a career thinking about what it means to educate for critical consciousness rather than ideological conformity.
These facts do not make me objective. They make me an informed witness. I am not writing about Boghossian from the distance of a think-tank report or a media profile. I am writing as someone who watched this particular intellectual transformation happen, who recognized some of what he described about institutional life as real, and who believes his response to those real problems has become something far worse than the disease he diagnosed.
The Hijab and the Rorschach Test
On February 1, the Office of Immigrant Affairs of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani posted a message marking World Hijab Day and celebrating Muslim women “who choose to wear the hijab” as an expression of faith, identity, and pride. Masih Alinejad, the Iranian-American journalist who has spent a decade fighting compulsory veiling at extraordinary personal cost—surviving kidnapping plots and assassination attempts orchestrated by the Islamic Republic—responded with a searing rebuke. While New York celebrated the hijab as a choice, she wrote, women in Iran were being shot in the streets. Between 30,000 and 36,000 people were killed by security forces during the January crackdown on nationwide protests, the deadliest state violence against civilians in the Islamic Republic’s history. “You are standing with our jailers,” Alinejad told Mamdani.
Boghossian reposted both messages and added: “We should all take a few minutes from our busy day and really think about this.”
I have been thinking about it. I have been thinking about it for most of my life.
I grew up under the system that mandated the hijab. I know what compulsory veiling means: not as a debate topic, not as a social media post, but as a daily fact of life under theocratic rule. The women Alinejad speaks for are my people. Their struggle is not an abstraction to me. When I read her words to Mamdani, I feel their force in a register that precedes argument.
And precisely because I feel that force, I notice something about the way Boghossian handles this material. He does not engage with the philosophical complexity of the hijab as a phenomenon. He does not ask the hard questions: How does the same garment function simultaneously as an instrument of state terror in Tehran and an expression of autonomous identity in Brooklyn? How should a pluralistic city government navigate the real tension between affirming its Muslim residents’ religious practices and condemning the theocratic violence that coerces those same practices elsewhere? Could Mamdani’s office have marked the day while also acknowledging the women’s movement in Iran? What formulation honors both the woman in New York who veils freely and the woman in Tehran who dies for unveiling?
These questions interest me because they are difficult in ways that matter. They do not interest Boghossian, or at least they do not appear in his posts, because they are not useful. A nuanced treatment of the hijab does not generate engagement. A sardonic repost does. The suffering of Iranian women is real. The use Boghossian makes of it is instrumental. It serves not as an occasion for philosophical inquiry but as evidence for a conclusion his audience has already reached about Islam, about progressive politics, about the naivety of multicultural liberalism.
I recognize this move because I have seen it before, from many directions. The Iranian regime instrumentalizes women’s bodies to project ideological authority. Western commentators instrumentalize Iranian women’s suffering to prosecute their own domestic culture wars. In neither case are the women the point. They are the means.
Alinejad’s critique, by contrast, is earned. She has risked her life for it. She has been explicit that she does not oppose the hijab as such, only its coerced imposition. Her argument operates at the level of principle: bodily autonomy, the right to dress according to one’s own conscience. A philosopher serious about this principle would recognize that it cuts in both directions: against compulsory veiling in Tehran and against the cultural pressure Muslim women in the West sometimes face to remove their covering. Boghossian’s framing acknowledges only one direction, because the other does not serve his purposes.
What I Saw at Portland State
I want to be careful here because the story within the institution is more complicated than either Boghossian’s or his critics’ versions allow.
Some of what Boghossian described about Portland State was real. There were moments when institutional culture made it difficult to raise certain questions, when diversity trainings operated more as catechism than inquiry, when the language of social justice functioned as a loyalty test rather than an analytical framework. I teach courses in philosophy of education and social foundations of education. I am not naive about how institutions can substitute moral certainty for intellectual rigor. These are problems I take seriously in my own classroom.
But Boghossian’s account was also selective in ways that revealed more about his trajectory than about the institution. He described a university consumed by ideology. I experienced a university struggling, imperfectly, with hard questions about equity, access, and the purpose of public higher education. These are questions that do not have easy answers and that deserve sustained engagement rather than denunciation. He described students “trained to mimic the moral certainty of ideologues.” I have spent over two decades in the classroom with graduate students, many of them working professionals, who are fully capable of independent thought and who do not need to be rescued from their own convictions by a self-appointed liberator.
There is a philosophical term for what Boghossian did with Portland State: he treated a complex institution as a synecdoche for everything he opposed, flattened its internal contradictions into a single narrative of corruption, and then used that narrative as a launching pad for his next career move. His resignation letter, published through Bari Weiss’s newsletter and amplified across conservative media, was not addressed to the university. It was addressed to an audience.
Boghossian held a non-tenure-track position that was renewed annually for over a decade. The university he described as intolerant of dissent rehired him every year despite his increasingly public provocations. When he resigned, he had been scheduled to teach the following term again. The “Social Justice factory” kept offering him a job. He chose to leave, and the choice was made legible, and profitable, by a media ecosystem hungry for exactly this kind of narrative: the brave freethinker driven out by the woke mob.
The Education of a Philosopher
Boghossian earned his Ed.D. from Portland State in 2004 with a thesis on using the Socratic method with prison inmates to develop critical thinking and moral reasoning. I mention this because it matters for evaluating what came after.
I have read the dissertation. It is competent work, grounded in the literature of the field. What struck me, reading it now, is who Boghossian relied on to build his theoretical framework. His glossary includes conscientização—Paulo Freire’s term for the cultivation of critical social awareness. His literature review draws substantively on Freire’s critique of the “banking concept” of education, in which teachers deposit information into passive students. He uses Freire not as a foil but as a foundation. Boghossian’s argument that the Socratic method represents a superior pedagogy is, in part, built on Freire’s analysis of what is wrong with traditional instruction. His introduction acknowledges that high incarceration rates stem from “structural problems such as racism, poor schooling, lack of economic opportunity”: the kind of structural analysis he would later deride when other scholars conducted it.
I note this without malice. Scholars evolve. But there is a difference between evolving beyond a theoretical framework and repudiating it while pretending you never stood on it. Boghossian’s post-2018 career is built on the claim that critical pedagogy, social justice scholarship, and the intellectual tradition descending from Freire represent a corruption of the university’s mission; that they are, in his words, the output of a “Social Justice factory.” His own doctoral work is a product of that factory. The credential that made him Dr. Boghossian, that got him hired at PSU, that launched the career he later leveraged into media prominence—it was built with the tools he now calls fraudulent.
The Socratic method, properly understood, is not a technique for winning arguments. It is a practice of shared inquiry in which the questioner is genuinely open to discovering that they are wrong. Socrates did not know where his conversations would end. That uncertainty, that willingness to follow the argument wherever it leads, is what gives the method its power and its moral seriousness. The moment you know where the conversation is supposed to end before it begins, you are no longer doing philosophy. You are doing something else. You may be doing rhetoric, or persuasion, or political communication. These are legitimate activities. But they are not the Socratic method, and calling them that is intellectual dishonesty.
I raise this point because Boghossian’s public practice has undergone a transformation that his philosophical vocabulary has not. He still speaks the language of open inquiry, critical thinking, and following the evidence. But the practice no longer matches the language. His social media posts do not pose open questions; they pose rhetorical questions whose answers are encoded in the framing. His interviews are not dialogues between equals pursuing truth; they are performances for an audience that already shares his conclusions. His institutional affiliations are not with organizations committed to actual intellectual pluralism; they are with organizations that have identified their enemies and are building infrastructure to defeat them.
Let me be specific. Boghossian is now a Founding Faculty Fellow at the University of Austin, an institution whose initial promise of ideological diversity led Steven Pinker to sign on as an advisor, only to withdraw over concerns that it was “polarizing in the opposite direction.” He is the executive director of the National Progress Alliance, a nonprofit (according to tax records reviewed by The Intercept) primarily funded by a foundation closely tied to Christopher Rufo, the activist who engineered the political weaponization of “critical race theory.” He has appeared at Hungary’s Mathias Corvinus Collegium, an Orbán-aligned institution. He has forged a working alliance with Michael O’Fallon, a Christian nationalist whose platform, Sovereign Nations, promotes conspiracy theories about the “Great Reset.”
This last point deserves emphasis. Boghossian built his career on the proposition that all faith-based beliefs are delusions. He wrote a book, A Manual for Creating Atheists, whose explicit purpose was to talk people out of religious conviction. He now works in close partnership with a Calvinist-inflected Christian nationalist movement. The reconciliation is not theological but strategic: militant atheism and Christian nationalism find common cause in opposition to progressive social movements. The enemy of my enemy is my ally, even if my ally believes things I have publicly called delusional.
A philosopher of education, which is what Boghossian trained to be and what I am, would recognize this as a case study in the very phenomenon Boghossian claims to oppose: the subordination of reasoned inquiry to ideological allegiance. When your funding comes from Rufo’s network, your institutional home is backed by conservative billionaires, your endorsement graces a manifesto calling for state-imposed ideological compliance at universities, and your intellectual allies include people whose beliefs you once called psychiatric delusions—you are not a freethinker. You are a factional operative who has learned that the language of free thought is more marketable than the language of faction.
The Asymmetry
If Boghossian were applying his critical tools evenly, I would have no complaint. Criticize compulsory hijab? Absolutely. I will stand beside him. Question the intellectual rigor of academic disciplines? Fine, provided you also question the intellectual rigor of the think tanks and media platforms that now sustain your career. Defend free speech on campus? Essential. But then defend it when the speech in question comes from the left as well as the right, and do not endorse manifestos that would use state funding mechanisms to impose ideological litmus tests on public universities.
The problem is the asymmetry. Islam receives the full force of Boghossian’s critical attention. Christianity—or more precisely, the political movement that instrumentalizes Christianity to restrict reproductive rights, remove books from libraries, and target transgender Americans—receives the soft treatment reserved for allies. The man who once called the Republican Party “the most powerful, anti-science political movement in the world” now appears on evangelical podcasts to discuss “How Can We Save the West?”, a framing borrowed from the civilizational anxiety of the European far right.
In January 2026, Boghossian hosted a Comedy Cellar event framed as an exploration of “men’s perspectives in an increasingly feminized and deranged world.” The word “deranged” is doing philosophical work here, and the work it is doing is foreclosing inquiry. An honest philosophical question would be: What social changes have affected men’s experience of identity and purpose, and how should we understand them? “Feminized and deranged” is not a question. It is a diagnosis, one that assumes its conclusion and flatters an audience that has already accepted it.
When the University of Austin promoted its test-score-based admissions, Boghossian amplified language that read: “Your race is irrelevant. Your indigeneity status is irrelevant. You speak 10 languages fluently? Irrelevant. You feel like you were born in the wrong body? Irrelevant.” That final sentence has nothing to do with admissions standards. It is a gratuitous swipe at transgender identity inserted into a meritocratic frame: a signal to the base dressed up as a principle.
What Philosophy Requires
I teach philosophy of education to graduate students who are working professionals: school administrators, counselors, and adult educators. Many of them arrive in my courses with strong convictions. My job is not to replace those convictions with my own. It is to help them examine the foundations of what they believe, to introduce them to thinkers who challenge their assumptions, and to model a rigorous, non-coercive practice of inquiry.
This work is slow, unglamorous, and does not scale well to social media. It does not produce viral moments or generate subscriber revenue. It requires sitting with ambiguity, tolerating disagreement, and maintaining intellectual honesty even when honesty is uncomfortable. It requires, above all, the willingness to be changed by the encounter, to discover that you were wrong about something you felt certain about.
I do not see this willingness in Boghossian’s recent work. What I see is a man who has identified his audience, learned what it wants to hear, and developed an efficient apparatus for delivering it, all while retaining the vocabulary of philosophical inquiry as a brand. The Socratic method has become a marketing strategy. The commitment to following the evidence has become a commitment to following the funding. The philosopher has become an influencer.
This is not a uniquely Boghossian problem. It is a structural feature of the attention economy as it intersects with intellectual life. The incentives of social media and subscription-based publishing reward certainty, provocation, and tribal loyalty. They punish nuance, ambiguity, and the kind of patient, open-ended inquiry that philosophy demands. Boghossian is not the only thinker to have been deformed by these incentives. But he is a particularly instructive case because he began with a genuine commitment to the Socratic method and a genuine talent for public philosophical engagement. The distance between where he started and where he has arrived illuminates just how powerful those incentives are.
Coda
Peter Boghossian once wrote that the purpose of the Socratic method is to help people “value reason and rationality, cast doubt on their religious beliefs, mistrust their faith, abandon superstition and irrationality, and ultimately embrace reason.”
The question his career now poses, and it is a genuine question, not a rhetorical one, is whether he would be willing to apply this method to himself. To his faith in the national conservative diagnosis of Western civilization. To his trust in the institutions and donors that now sustain his work. To his certainty that progressive ideas represent a civilizational threat requiring state intervention. To his belief that he is a freethinker while his opponents are ideologues.
I am a philosopher of education. I believe in the possibility of intellectual transformation. I believe people can change their minds when confronted with better arguments and honest evidence. I would welcome a conversation with Boghossian, a real one, not a performance, about the questions that matter to both of us: What is education for? What does it mean to think freely? How do we build institutions that genuinely serve inquiry rather than ideology?
But that conversation would require him to sit in the uncertainty again. And I am not sure he remembers how.