Loading summary
Transcript6 lines
- [00:01]
A
Insurance isn't one size fits all. That's why customers have enjoyed Progressive's name your price tool for years now. With the name your price tool, you tell them what you want to pay and they'll show you options that fit your budget. So whether you're picking out your first policy or just looking for something that works better for you and your family, they make it easy to see your options. Visit progressive.com, find a rate that works for you with the name your price tool. Progressive Casualty Insurance company and affiliates Price and coverage match limited by state law,
- [00:39]
B
We don't notice these assumptions till things start to go wrong. Until, so to speak, the smell coming up from below is so bad that we are forced to take up the floorboards and do something. Which is why I've often suggested that philosophy is best understood as a form of plumbing, the way in which we service the deep infrastructure of our life. This is something both deeper and more outward looking than just examining the structure of our current thought and language. It seems to be what Dharak Dumit is calling for.
- [01:15]
C
Hello, and welcome to Philosophy for Our Times, bringing you the world's leading thinkers on today's biggest ideas. It's Daniel here, and today I've gone deep into the IAI archive to bring you a talk by an icon of modern philosophy, Mary Midgley. Mary was best known for her focus on the relationship between man and nature and that of science and religion. Today we'll hear Mary discuss the decline in the study of pre1990s philosophy in universities, and even more worryingly, the decline in interest in philosophy as a whole. Mary makes the case that philosophy is essential if we want to understand the world around us and question what we take as gospel, bringing together key moments from philosophy's history to prove her point. So, without further ado, let's hand over to Mary.
- [02:10]
B
Well, good morning. I'm delighted to be at Hay again. I think this is a splendid way of having gone so particular and the like, and I'll proceed as I actually called this talk, does philosophy got out of date? Not just Descartes, but philosophy in general. I started to get interested in this sometime back when rumors reached me that at some universities no philosophy is being taught except what had been published in the last 20 years. These rumors are hard to check and practice actually varies a lot from one university to another. In Scotland, they don't do it until, but in Oxford they do. It seems cars have been seen in the States with bumper stickers bearing the message say Just say No to history of philosophy. A Princeton philosopher had that notice outside his door. It also emerges that the term history of philosophy has changed its meaning. It's now used to describe all study of later, older writers, not just study with the historical angle. So Harman's idea is that you shouldn't read them at all and should certainly not take them seriously as philosophy. A philosopher naked retired from Oxford, told me his successor had got rid of all the journals in the library dated earlier than the last 10 years. Friends of Cambridge say things aren't quite so bad there, but still rather alarming. The student there recently explained that in the course of his undergraduate career, he had not read a word of Aristotle, Kant or Descartes. My informant at this said, my heart sank. Well, same does mine. But I think we need to ask why our hearts sink and just what this change is intended to do. When I was wondering about this, I remembered some things that happened in the Thatcher years, when cuts first began to threaten universities. Administrators who were threatened to sternly told to economize, saw that the quickest way to do it was simply to close short, small departments. This would enable them to harmonize with the mystique of centers of excellence. Anybody remember centers of excellence? Yes, indeed, which was then in fashion. These centres were supposed to be big schools in which the study of a given subject was so well covered that no other departments in the country would be needed. Thus, ideally, all the physics would be done at Manchester, all the economics at LSE, and all the philosophy, if any, was still needed. Docs, since philosophy departments were usually small, universities did indeed start to cut them. Eight of them in Britain that went during that time, as one vanished after another. It struck me that nobody was saying that this ought not to happen. Nobody was suggesting that the subject was important in itself, that universities needed to teach it, that if they were not teaching it, they were in some sense not really universities at all. Followed by this thought, I wrote to a number of the eminent philosophers of the day, saying, in effect, do something, write to the Times, because that's what we did in those days, let people know that this is important. Nothing much came of this, but one of the replies which came back still strikes me as significant. I didn't keep it because it made me so cross, but I remember perfectly well what it said. It came from that very distinguished Oxford philosopher, Michael Dunnett, and he told me flatly that it was wrong in principle to try and preserve all these provincial philosophy departments. Philosophy, he said, was a serious and highly technical subject which should only be studied at its own proper level. And what that Dummett meant by the proper level is clear from a well known passage in his writings where he says that the proper object of philosophy has only been finally established with the rise of the modern logical and analytical style of philosoph. This object, he said, was the analysis of the structure of thought, for which the only proper method is the analysis of language. Unsurprisingly, he thought this business and linguistic analysis had now become a highly technical pursuit, something increasingly like nuclear physics, and could only be carried on by people specially trained in it. Now the question Dummett raised is about the aim, the point, the proper object of philosophy. What are we actually trying to do? And it strikes me at once that when Socrates talked about the great dangers that threaten human life, he didn't actually mention the danger of unexamined thought or unexamined language. What Socrates warned us against was an unexamined life. It is surely the attempt to examine life as a whole that has been the prime business of traditional philosophy. Only quite lately did a quite different pattern of philosophizing catch on. A pattern that's modeled on the physical, closely on the physical sciences, and is reverently called research. In those sciences, progress can be seen as consisting in accumulating a string of facts, in moving on from one empirical discovery to another. This seems often to be imagined as a mining operation, a steady process of digging through the intervening strata to reach the truth which is hidden far beneath. In this process, the obstacles that have been removed are of course, only of passing concern. Once they've been conquered, they become irrelevant to the inquiry. And that's why a physicist pass to a physicist, past physical discoveries often have only a mild historical interest. His business is always with the next discovery. This accounts for his exclusive concentration on the latest giants and also for the very revealing metaphor of the cutting edge of research. Of course, this sort of progress does happen and can be very useful, can go on for a long time. But even in physical science, it's never the whole story is can only work so long as there's a given linear pattern, a preset journey which will reliably go from A to B and so on to the end of the Alphabet in the expected direction. Even in the sciences, that pattern doesn't always work. Often the next important discovery is going to be to crop up somewhere quite different, right off to the side of the expected look. Some awkward character, such as Copernicus or Einstein or Faraday or Darwin, mentions a new thought which calls for quite new direction, a new way of envisaging the subject. It's of some interest that Peter Higgs, the discovery of that person, says he would never have been allowed to do the work that was supposed to lead to it if people had known that he was doing that instead of what he was meant to be doing. The reason why they can do this, these people, is that they themselves have been looking at things differently. They found a new standpoint from which entirely unexpected things are visible. So how is this possible? Historians sometimes treat these achievements either as something inevitable or as a kind of miracle due to individual genius. That's why some people mistakenly think they should go on cutting up Einstein's brain, because it will show them some wisdom. But what's really happening is both more obvious and more interesting than that. It is. These original thinkers have stood back from from their local problem. They've placed it in its wider context and thought about it, how it connects with the surrounding scenery. They've been using telescopes rather than microscopes so they can deal with the larger subject matter. In short, they have been philosophizing. This business of looking at life as a whole, finding wider context to give sense to their immediate problems is philosophers distinctive act losses, distinctive activity, which is not one more speciality. It's the business of mapping how they feel. It's what makes it a genuinely important occupation, in fact, an occupation that matters to all of us. Philosophy is not just one more speciality among others. It's a kind of conceptual geography that looks at the relation between the subject matters of other ways of thinking, not just academic ones, and tries to map it. The reason why some philosophers become well known is not that they discovered new facts, but that they shifted the whole standpoint of thought. Lossless help repeatedly brought absurdities to the intention of their age by applying displaying current customs against a new background and pointing out the strange assumptions that occur distorted them. For instance, when Rousseau had started his Book of the Social Contract by saying, man is born free and everywhere he is in chains, he was lighting up some crunching discrepancies between theory and practice, which had to be investigated if current problems were to be properly dealt with. Similarly, when this same Rousseau pointed out the strangely unnatural way in which babies were being reared, babies who were removed from their mothers, bandaged onto boards and handed over to carers who might well not care much for them, people started to notice anomalies in their whole idea of what nature is and how us relates to our species. More immediately, they also started for the first time to pay some attention to small children. As they'd gone on doing ever since. And since we all start like as small children, this isn't a bad idea. Now, I think it's interesting that our forefathers apparently couldn't see through these previous muddled ways of thinking until someone like Rousseau pointed it out. If not, the assumptions that had produced these earlier customs simply persisted till some shock was delivered, till they were plainly stated in a form that could be grasped and made more workable. This shows how deeply our thought depends on a mass of unstated assumptions, very much in the way that our physical life depends on the things that go on beneath us, the hidden shifting masses of the earth beneath us. We don't notice these assumptions till things start to go wrong. Until, so to speak, the smell coming up from below is so bad we are forced to take up the floorboards and do something. This is why I've often suggested that philosophy is best understood as a form of plumbing, the way in which we service the deep infrastructure of our life. This is something both deeper and more outward looking than just examining the structure of our current thought and language, which seems to be what direct damage is calling for. Another useful piece of dummy plumbing was done in late 17th century when John Lott discovered the concept of tolerance. During most of that century, you see, people throughout Europe had assumed that they must not tolerate disagreement. If they couldn't agree on a single truth about religion, they must just go on fighting till they did. And meanwhile individual heretics must be converted or punished. The idea that different opinions could perfectly well be allowed just side by side was seen as a culpable weakness, leading to anarchy. What eventually struck Locke and what he was able to express in his writings, was that this system of competing dogmas can work because the truth is simply too complicated. Nobody ever has the whole truth, so people who grasp different bits of it can in fact perfectly well live peacefully together. Indeed, that may be the best way of eventually getting the various partial truths together. This discovery, as I'm calling it, was not, of course, as scientific discoveries usually are, simply a matter of finding a brand new ready made fact, such as that the earth goes around the sun. It was much more like inventing a new musical instrument and working out how to play it. Anybody remember that poem of Mrs. Browning's about the great God Pan making himself a breed by the river and learning to play it. Wonderful music came out. Yeah, well, this is, you see, a larger matter than just discovering a fact. Locke and the people who worked with him had to learn how to tolerate, learn how to Tolerate what had previously seemed intolerable, how to do business with people they previously thought were outside the pale. They had to learn how to look at the outer borders of this toleration and decide what must still be regarded as intolerable. I have to mention that I'd just been having a most interesting discussion in Green room with a number of feminists who are bothered by vicious attacks from various sides of feminism on people who aren't being the right orthodox kind. They need to read their law above other ideas. Rightly, in fact. Toleration, like all other big philosophical ideas, is a very complex instrument, as hard to play as the cello or the bassoon. Which is why we still have so much difficulty learning how to handle it properly, and why we still need to go on thinking out the ideals behind it and the other ideals around which we try to structure our lives. Ideals such as equality, freedom, compassion, fraternity or sisterhood and justice are all as complicated as they're attractive. Yet they all have to be thought out and used together by the whole orchestra. These ideals were of course central to the message, these particular ideals central to the message of the Enlightenment. A message which we now assume is the obvious framework for any decent human life. But the Enlightenment story itself was not always obvious. It didn't drop ready made out of a machine called history. It had to be indented, devised with a great deal of hard grinding work by philosophers like Rosman, Rousseau and the others. And it has had to be thought through with increasing labor up to the present day. In every age more work of this kind is needed, because the truth about the world is endlessly complicated. Are we getting any clearer now about what is the real aim of philosophical idea inquiry? One thing that's already clear, surely, is that it can't be at all like the aim of any particular physical science. Physical sciences spiral inward and down upon particular bits of the truth, which sometimes are ready made facts, while philosophy rages indefinitely outwards, looking for new connections, new ways of thinking and living. So it's quite proper for nuclear physicists to know more and more about less and less definitions of specialists. But philosophers are supposed to do almost the opposite, to find links that will restructure the whole scope of our experience and allow us to live differently. Their use is to extend our range. They bring in an a landscape insight that nobody even knew was there. Of course, the contrast between these two forms of thought is not a complete one, as we've seen. Physical scientists do sometimes have to widen their views in order to shift their focus. And philosophers too must sometimes deal with detailed technical questions. But in their general balance, these two approaches really are opposed to not because they're at war, but because they serve quite different needs. Nuclear physicists are normally addressing a limited audience of specialists, capable boost, can't share much of their knowledge and want to know more about a particular aspect of it. But the philosopher's business is something that concerns everybody. Philosophy aims to bring together those aspects of life that have not yet been properly connected up, so as to make a more coherent, more workable world picture. And that coherent world picture is not a private luxury, something absolutely essential for human life. Word pictures, perspectives, imaginative visions of how the whole world is, are the necessary background of all our lives. They are often much more important to us than our factual knowledge. I am struck by the fact that climate skeptics resolute determined planet skeptics aren't interested in facts. Facts may be quite against them that they've got a worldview which doesn't allow such things. We all have these background pictures and we usually get them half consciously from the people around us. We often don't ask where they came from. But if we do ask about that, we shall probably find that they were shaped by earlier philosophers, often long ago influenced our tradition, and that for us at present, that often reels of the prophets of the Enlightenment, people like Locke, Rousseau, Descartes, Hobbes, Hume, Mill, Marx and Nietzsche. This earlier philosophy doesn't get obsolete. Far from that, it's still vigorously alive. It forms part of the way we think. It has deep roots and soiled our lives. And it goes on developing now in its own characteristic way, until somebody comes along and rethinks it. That's why people who refuse to think philosophically so often end up trapped in bits of old philosophy that they've unconsciously taken from their predecessors. The alternative is to be enslaved by harsh thought. In this way is to attend directly to these big ideas. And at means looking what these earlier philosophers actually said and seeing how it relates to our life today. If we do this, we shall often find that these people's message was far more subtle than the crude versions of it, that we are still working in our tradition. In fact, it's still throwing out shoots that can help us today. The reason why these philosophers caught the attention of their times was, as I've said, not just that they solved particular problems, but they lit up life from an unexpected angle. They suggested not just new thoughts, but whole new concepts, distinctive approaches, new ways of thinking. Of course, none of these new approaches solves all problems, but each of them gives us a fresh start, fresh tools for the endless balancing act by which we try to understand our confusing world. We can see how influential these suggestions still are, not just because people today still quote from, say, Marx or Nietzsche or Plato or Buddha in their illustrations, but because current thinking as a whole is still often visibly shaped by these people, colored through in a way that the people who are using it now often aren't aware of. So how can it be plausible to think that they are out of date? We can now forget them. How could it not be necessary for us to attend to these still influential factors in our lives? The point is not just that, as I've suggested, we need to check their details to protect ourselves against distorted versions of our message. This is still working in our tradition. We need also to attend to these mighty trees themselves for their own sake. We need to understand them because they have shaped the hose way of life that is still live by. They are still active features in our present life, parts of the tangled forest through which we're still traveling. In fact, the reason why we need to learn about the history of philosophy is just the same reason as why we need to learn about the rest of our history. Namely, that without grasping the past, we can't hope to understand the present. On the political theme, this is surely obvious. We know that if we haven't grasped, for instance, the past history of the ravenous way in which Western nations competed to gobble up other people countries during the 19th century, we can't hope to understand why so many people in those gobbled countries still feel towards us. The use of the word crusaders is an interesting thing here. Historical epochs don't just succeed one another randomly, like successive spinnings of a roulette wheel. One follows from another across their parts, phases at a continuum, organically connected. So you often really cannot understand where you are now without grasping a background that tells you how you got there. I think this is much more obvious when we look at a foreign culture like maybe Japan, and ask how the hell could people have these customs? And the explanation usually is because the samurai did this or that, you know, because that's how they got there. But in our own country, we often don't want. And if this background is necessary for understanding politics, it is still more necessary for our moral and intellectual life. Without it, we can't really make sense of current conflicts. In particular, I think any student who's now expected to study the philosophy of the last 20 years without being told about the long sweep of history that produced it is doomed to frustration. And that student has all the more right to resent that frustration because, as we've seen, it affects not just his or her knowledge, but their whole worldview, their imaginative understanding of life. We need to grasp the story of our past intellectual evolution so as to understand where we are today just as badly as we need to know about our past biological and evolution. I'm sure you've got my eye on me and I'm melee again. Philosophy, in fact, is not just one specialized subject like another, something which you don't need to take up unless you mean to lecture on, is something which we all do to some extent all the time, a continuous background activity which is likely to go badly if we don't attend to it in that way. It is perhaps more like driving a car or using money than it is like nuclear physics. And perhaps it is more like music than it is like any of these other occupations. It Anyway, like good music, good philosophy does not easily get out of deck.
- [27:33]
C
Thank you for listening to Philosophy for our Times. What do you think? Is philosophy still relevant? And if so, how can we engage more students in a subject which is often associated with old people with too much time on their hands? If you have any suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments on whatever platform you're using, or send me an email using the address in the description. You can also head over to our website IAI TV for thousands more brilliant debates, talks and interviews from the world's leading thinkers. Bye.
- [28:10]
A
You're listening to this podcast, so I know you've got a curious mind. Here's a helpful fact you might not know yet. Drivers who switch and save with Progressive save over $900 on average. Pop over to progressive.com, answer some questions and you'll get a quick quote with discounts that are easy to come by. In fact, 99% of their auto customers earn at least one discount. Visit progressive.com and see if you can enjoy a little cash back Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates national average 12 month savings of $946 by new customers surveyed who saved with Progressive between June 2024 and May 2025. Potential savings will vary.