Abstract

This paper challenges Pierre Bourdieu’s claim that successful people’s career dispositions cannot be specified. After presenting how I approached stand-up comedy, I consider philosophy, a field on which Bourdieu has written. I present some dispositions of some successful people in philosophy, e.g. “Do not get involved with really really fine details, such as the difference between the word “error” and the word ‘mistake.’ Maybe there is some difference, but hardly anyone outside of Oxford cares and you need to appeal to the average philosopher.” But then I consider two objections, one of which I regard as more of a problem: they seem to do something different when an authority tells them to and this can be quite surprising, such as suddenly working on trans-rights. In the appendix, there is some material about Juliette Binoche and Virginia Woolf.