Taylor Swift isn’t just a billionaire songwriter and performer. She’s also a philosopher.

As a Swiftie and a philosopher, I’ve found that this claim surprises Swifties and philosophers alike. But once her fans learn a bit more about philosophy – and philosophers learn a bit more about Swift’s work – both groups can appreciate her songwriting in new ways.

When one of the greatest philosophers, Socrates, famously said, “The unexamined life is not worth living,” he was arguing that people cannot even know whether they are living a meaningful life unless they subject their choices and their values to scrutiny.

Like other great writers, Swift’s songwriting consistently involves just the kind of introspective scrutiny about choices and values that Socrates had in mind. Several songs address the value of self-understanding, even when it’s difficult.

Amid a breakup, the narrator in “Happiness” sings, “Honey, when I’m above the trees I see this for what it is.” Yet she describes how it can be hard to maintain an objective perspective on a relationship while also navigating the end of it. “And in the disbelief I can’t face reinvention / I haven’t met the new me yet,” she sings. Her partner is looking for “the green light of forgiveness,” when she tells them that “You haven’t met the new me yet / And I think she’ll give you that.”

The Swift-like narrator in “Anti-hero” makes a similar point about the challenges of self-awareness. “I’ll stare directly at the sun, but never in the mirror,” she sings, referencing how it’s often easier to identify truths about the external world than to face facts about oneself, and that her tendency toward self-deception limits her ability to become wiser with age.

Everyone inherits a set of beliefs and assumptions from their parents, peers and culture, which can inhibit our ability to truly understand others and ourselves.

In Swift’s “Daylight,” she describes how she once viewed relationships as “black and white” or “burning red.” Letting go of those old, reductive narratives enabled her to see her relationships – and herself – more clearly. She’s emerged from what she describes as a “twenty-year dark night” to see the more complicated, liberating truth: daylight.

Socrates showed that the best way to scrutinize one’s choices and values is through sustained, sometimes argumentative, conversation with others. To a nonphilosopher, philosophy often looks like devil’s advocacy or trolling – arguing just for the sake of it. But to philosophers, disagreeableness is a virtue that helps counteract reflexive dogmatism and conformity.

Swift, too, is argumentative in her songwriting, often making a moral argument to an imagined listener – frequently, a romantic partner. In other lyrics, Swift rebuts unfair critics and record executives.

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