okay so this is build as a talk for freshers so some of the things I'm going to say are going to be directed at people who just beginning studying philosophy at University but I think in order to read philosophy at all you have to study it so anybody who picks up a philosophy book is in a sense a student of philosophy so this is much broader than just directed at freshers but I'll get the easy bit out of the way first um the real value of studying philosophy comes in the second half of this roughly 20 minute talk and there'll be a chance for you to ask me questions as well and that's very important because I think philosophy is essentially subject to dialogue rather than monologue so the easy bit is philosophy is a fantastic sub subject to study because of the side effects if you look at the data on this it's quite remarkable that students who study philosophy at University at under undergraduate level perform brilliant ly in Graduate Studies tests in in the states when they're looking at going into graduate school in verbal reasoning and in analytic reasoning particularly but also oddly uh they perform quite well in mathematical analysis so there's there are all kinds of spin-offs of studying philosophy and that's the instrumental value but I want to park that because I don't think that's the reason why philosophy is such a wonderful subject that's just a very useful thing you can tell your parents if you need to persuade them the value of studying philosophy at University for me the great value of philosophy is that it transforms the people who study it inevitably almost if you study it for a few hours it will transform you if you do it properly and for me what studying it properly means is engaging with it not simply letting it um become not simply absorbing it passively so from so philosophy isn't a spectator sport it's it's different from some other subjects because when you study it you actually have to do it in the way that if you kick a football around on a field you're actually playing football you may not be as good as Pelle or Ronaldo or whoever it is but you're still doing you're still playing football when you're studying philosophy you're actually doing philosophy because you're engaging with arguments thinking about what follows from the various ideas that have been expressed but also you're if you're doing it sincerely you're thinking about how you should live what's the nature of reality just as a philosopher will and it's if you simply learn it as a dogmatic subject that's not really studying philosophy that's letting it wash over you and I believe this fact about philosophy explains in some ways why it's so transformative I'm going to come back at the end of The Talk as well to another way in which it's transformative but John Stuart Mill who's one of my heroes crystallized this in his book on Liberty which was published in 1859 which is a fantastic little book where he's talking about the value of free speech so free speech essentially for him has value because it allows people to flourish in various ways and the freedom to to express your views even if they're dissenting views has an immense value because it's a catalyst for other people to think philosophies often following on from Socrates at the beginning um a subject which is attracts gadflies um people who irritate other people because they ask awkward questions and that's actually at the heart of philosophy asking difficult questions or awkward questions that other people may not want to ask fundamental questions about what follows from what do you really believe what you're you're saying and so on um now when when a dissenter ask ask something even if that person expresses that view in quite a forceful way for Mill that person's value isn't simply that they might be saying something that could be true although he allows that many of the most important thinkers of history have been dissenting voices like Galileo or you might think Jesus there have been people who Stand Out Socrates who go against the flow ask difficult questions and turn out to have said some things which were very profound but for me a lot of the value comes in the fact that they force people to think in a non-dogmatic way so philosophy is a subject which encourages you to think non-dogmatic by that I mean you don't I don't know how a television works I don't know how my iPhone works really but I can use it quite effectively both of those things I'm going to watch a football match tonight I'm going to make some phone calls that's not difficult but you can't just absorb the conclusions of philosophy in that way you can't say look I now I know what Vicken Stein thought so I don't need to understand how he got to those conclusions or now I understand having expressed it what John Stewart Mills thought about Free Speech the point about philosophy is you have to understand the reasoning that led to the conclusion and understanding it involves thinking critically about it and that process is a very enlivening process it it's impossible to do it in a in a quiet um absorb uh what's the word a passive way as I said before it's it's it's an active subject so it's much more like a kind of physical fitness than it is like watching the sport I'll be watching the football match so i' be the couch potato but philosophy is not the subject for intellectual couch potatoes and beron Russell crystallized this quite nicely when he said that some people would sooner die than think in fact they do and this is the the big problem that as Daniel Carman has um pointed out thinking critically thinking analytically involves a lot of energy it's not an easy thing for us to do and we often rely on intuitive judgments and that's that works pretty well but there are times when you can't do that and philosophy is a subject which encourages you to think in that critical way for me starts with Socrates um that rather strange um portly bearded um Greek philosophy wanted around the marketplace challenging people asking them to defend their own positions things that they were supposed to know a lot about he'd asked the soldier about courage and the soldier couldn't Define courage and gradually Socrates would tease away at him and reveal to anybody standing by that the person who thought they knew what they were talking about didn't really know what they were talking about and uh Socrates friend went to visit an oracle not a method of finding out the truth that I'd recommend but the Oracle the delic Oracle said in response to the question who is the wisest person in Athens or the wisest man in Athens Socrates Socrates heard this didn't believe it but gradually as he wandered around the marketplace talking to people he got to realize that there was some truth in what the Oracle had said that his wisdom lay in knowing how little he knew everybody else thought they knew things but he realized how little he knew and that's [Music] the humble side of philosophy as it were that if you study philosophy you very quickly realize how little you know not just because reading philosophy can be quite a difficult thing to do but also because a lot of fundamental questions haven't been asked answered take up basic questions about right and wrong you don't need to go very far into it to discover that it isn't an easy thing to do to establish a system of Ethics they're very polarized views on how we should live and there's no simple way of reading off the truth there so there's this humility of recognizing how little that we do actually know which is quite shocking to many people and how how little we can prove but there's also a kind of arrogance that's or um forcefulness that you need for philosophy as well which is the willingness to question received opinions this is the challenging of Dogma that I was saying is part of what John Stewart Mill emphasized so that those two qualities of I think of the virtues within philosophy some of the virtues there are others too um the humility to recognize that you might be wrong how little you know and also um to recognize that other people probably don't know what they're talking about most of the time um but also uh the arrogance or or full hardness in some cases of challenging people and asking why they believe things or actually pointing out contradictions or inconsistencies in what people say so those those two qualities are very useful in life in a whole range of areas because it allows you to to make a certain sort of jump of thinking it's very easy we are her like animals you know we historically we've grown up as social animals and it's very easy to fall into the Trap of going along with what other people believe and one of the things that interests me is how people in Nazi Germany for instance some people actually resisted uh what was going on around them in terms of narcissism very difficult when most of your colleagues would have um been indoctrinated in certain sorts of ways to do what um one individual did there's a there's a great photograph of a guy refusing to H Hitler when everybody else around him is doing it he got thrown into a concentration camp for doing it but it's quite remarkable he would dare to do that and to be able to stand out and be different and I think philosophy is the kind of subject that forces people to reflect in a way that has can have those side effects it's um it's also a great subject as a preparation for doing other things if you look in the list of what uh graduates of philosophy have gone on to do you'll find novelists so there are some obvious ones like Jean Paul S and Simone DEA who are philosophical novelists but hanif kesi study philosophy um uh the guy who wrote consider the lobster what's his name um what was iter David Foster Wallace studied philosophy to a high level um Angela studied philosophy in English there are many people who are in the Arts who who studied philosophy uh there are people who bars who Michael Mansfield studied philosophy there are there are people in in the city who studied philosophy there are even politicians who studied philosophy Believe It or Not Oliver Lewin has a PHD in philosophy there's a there's a um philosopher who's um in the labor party Barry Gardner did a started a PhD in philosophy and studied with John rules there a there are people in all walks of life excelling and I believe they've been transformed by philosophy these are everybody who studies is is transformed this is um partly because we're doing what um Socrates challenged us to do he Socrates famously said the unexamined life isn't worth living for a human being it's okay for cattle cattle can't reflect on their existence but philosophy is the subject which forces you to reflect on what what you're doing why you're doing it and whether you're consistent whether you're irrational you might put it on one side but certain point in life most of us need to reflect on questions like is there a god that's a fundamental question that philosophers have Through the Ages addressed there are other people who address it as well but philosophers particularly pay attention to the arguments that are used to support the idea that they might be a God or arguments like the problem of evil which suggest that there isn't a god so we all have to ask questions like is there a god what's the nature of reality that sounds like a an Airy fairy question but it comes up over and go over and over again in movies it seems to be an obsession with people day can't ask could I be dreaming is there any way I could tell whether I'm dreaming and now with virtual reality through Google Glass becoming something that will be affecting us all in the next decade I think we we will start to reflect on what is reality if you can have an enhanced reality is that Just an Illusion in the same way that Cinema might be an illusion or is it something which is actually part of reality we will cease to draw this distinction between the the inner and the outer world as it were there's a just the stuff around us those sort of philosophical questions arise quite naturally out of the changing technological environment so I think we're all going to need fundamental questions fascinating with typically questions about ethics and politics but also metaphysical questions the nature of time the nature of space those sorts of questions and they've worked away at those they don't tend to be the people who've written a paper that's a reply to a paper that's a reply to a paper and just um got obsessed with this sort of uh pingpong game of footnotes that goes on within Academia sometimes so if you do get frustrated as a student of philos which is possible because there are some very obscure and apparently unnecessary bits of philosophy what I recommend you do is go back to the great philosophers people like people like Socrates I've mentioned several times people like John St Mill people like David Hume people like nich SRA kard Vicken Stein John R people are established as great philosophers in fact the people who um I picked out for a little history of Phil ophy wouldn't do badly if if you want to get back in touch with the mainstream of philosophy so I have been a very privileged position of having met literally hundreds of the top philosophers in the last five years top living philosophers though several have died since not as a result of me meeting them um through making this podcast with David Edmund's philosophy bites philosophy bites is an idea it was David's idea that we go around and we interview a philosopher on a particular topic for about 15 minutes and crucial to that is the IDE idea that it's a dialogue it's a dialogue on a particular topic and the dialogue form has a long history in philosophy you know it's got it through through Socrates but almost all philosophy is discovered through dialogue it may not be face to-face dialogue there's a history of people writing letters to each other publishing books at each other and so on but principally it is a subject which thrives on conversation and debate it's very difficult to go off into a Hut somewhere which Vicken Stein did and come up with a meaningful philosophy without Challenge from other people so something I would also say is you have to recognize that it's a social subject that other people who disagree with you are the best kind of people to have around you because they're the ones that will make you think so that um if you're in a little group a cluster of people who all think the same way the best thing to do as a philosopher is to come up talk to somebody with polarized views someone who really objects to what you're saying and then see if you can meet the arguments because that's when you start to do philosophy so um a lot of the dialogues in the in the podcast they're audio podcast so it's just the spoken word um a lot of those aren't antagonistic dialogues and that's something else I I want to get in here there is a a vision of philosophy that's prevalent in many philosophy departments which is it's not expressed in this way but this is the critical view of it this is that philosophy is a kind of martial art and it's quite a macho martial art what you have to do is to learn all these techniques of argument so you can fend off sloppy thinking and get your um opponent into kind of Jiu-Jitsu hold and push the pressure points until they submit now it's very useful to have those skills of self-defense in argument available to you but philosophy is more than just exercising critical thinking skills I think it involves a kind of sincerity and I think it involves the kind of willingness to pursue questions that really matter and I think it's unfortunate that philosophy has appeared as a very male subject in um recently it's been picked out quite a lot this it's been very there's no reason why the philosophy philosophy has always to be done in that manner and I think the um the way that I I bring this out is through um product placement of the Duck Rabbit this um icon which could either be a duck facing that way or rabbit facing this way it's a famous not optical illusion a famous figure that's used in Psychology sometimes um and Vicken Stein picked this out as a an interesting thing to discuss and he spoke about it in terms of aspect seeing you can't see it as both a duck and a rabbit simultaneously it flips from one to the other but when it flips it's not that your retinal images change you're in terms of what's on the back of your eyeb the light is reflecting in the same way but you organize it differently there's a kind of gout shift as it's sometimes called and for me that's a really interesting metaphor for what philosophy can do this is what I was talking about in terms of it transforming people's lives it doesn't necessarily give you any new facts and I would say that if you're studying philosophy and you're just interested in dates of philosophers and learning facts about what philosophers said that won't be particularly valuable but the real value for me in philosophy is that it has the capacity on a whole range of topics of making people have a kind of Gest out shift like that you can move from seeing things one way to seeing them in a completely different way so I'll give you a couple of examples of this um a recent one one for me that worked quite well is uh Peter Singer the Australian philosopher has got a great thought experiment about charity giving money to charity he says if you imagine you're walking past a pond and there's a young child drowning in the pond say a 2-year-old child is drowning in the pond there's no one else around and you're wearing expensive trainers maybe your trainers cost 75 quid well that's probably cheap 100 quid um I don't know what they cost now but they're expensive not many people would walk past that child they would ruin their trainers weigh in save the child if they did walk past you think they're completely callous brutes so most people feel that they're prepared to sacrifice a 75 or 100 pound pair of trainers for the life of a child that it's not a big sacrifice it wouldn't they if they trainers cost 1,000s they'd still do it so why when we know that there are people starving in subsaharan Africa or dying from malaria that could have been avoided if they had malaria Nets mosquito Nets or dying from basic diseases that are easily um curable why are we not giving all of us that kind of money to save those lives and some people say well of course when you walking past the the pond there nobody else around so um it has to be me uh whereas lots of people can save those children in subsaharan Africa but there are so many of them that that's not true and so few people are actually making those sorts of donations that you can know with some certainty that if you don't sacrifice the money that you would have spent on trainers and give it to give the money to oxan for instance almost inevitably some children will die who wouldn't otherwise have died so why don't we do it you don't have to agree with the conclusion there but for me that's an example of somebody doing the same kind of thing that Socrates did challenging through clever use of example a common way of thinking I'm thinking well you know my shoes I I don't need to worry about this I can have several pairs of shoes but of course I would save a child in front of me if they were drowning but we know so much about what's going around in the rest rest the rest of the world at the moment that surely we ought to be consistent there or know why we're not consistent about giving money to help other people if I'm prepared to sacrifice that kind of money when somebody just happens to be right in front of me so that for me is one of those moments it it's it's a challenge to come up with good counterarguments and the classic way of meeting that is simply denial the psycholog olical um strategy that many of us use most of the time or as SRA put it to be in bad faith about our freedom so we we deny that we are free to to act otherwise of course we couldn't really be giving money and we anyway we don't know with any certainty what the effect of the money will be well Peter Singh is absolutely brilliant on this because he's got all the counterarguments to the standard objections so there's one example of a philosopher that um I think does a brilliant job of challenging people's thought and making you see the world differently um another one that struck me that was um binstein um he's got this notion of family resemblance a family resemblance term you know you look probably look a bit like your siblings like your parents biological parents there are resemblances between families but you probably don't look exactly like them that would be strange unless you're an identical twin and even then there' be differences so we have this pattern of overlapping resemblances in a family Vicken Stein said if you take a word like game the word game um what makes a game a game is it that there's a winner and a loser well solitire doesn't have a winner and a loser exactly um throwing a ball against the wall could be a game there are lots of things which don't quite might meet with the obvious definitions and this is frustrating when you move into other areas like you're trying to Define art which is what people quite often try try to do and Vicken Stein suggested that if you actually look and see how words are used you'll find that there are a number of Concepts which are like this there are just these patterns of overlapping resemblances that the assumption that there must be some Essence something which makes everything that thing that's called that thing is perhaps misguided so the whole history of Aesthetics where people are trying to Define art whether it's all art is significant form or art is the expression of emotion or art is representation all that history made the Assumption all the philosophers made the Assumption there must be some single unique common denominator to the things that we call Art or um if we use a word like game there must be some definition which picks out every single thing called game and what Vicken Stein suggest is that maybe there's just these patterns of overlapping resemblance there are nothing more so um there's there's no single defining feature that makes everything a game and for me that was a moment of realization because I've been struggling to think about what how you could possibly Define art and how mysterious it it is that nobody's come up with a good definition and for me this unlocked another way of thinking about the topic completely that what you have to look at is what art actually is and the number of different things the cluster of things that we call Art and that and not to make the assumption that there must be a single common denominator so for me those are just two examples of that gout shift that is represented in this Duck Rabbit which is for me the transformative element of philosophy it can just make you think complet completely different ways about material that you already understood and thought you or you thought you understood and about the world that you thought you knew it can take you to to a completely different place so forget the stuff about the martial arts that's just a um one upmanship in philosophy treat it seriously and it can change your life thank you that's really interesting I don't know if you could hear that um this gentleman was saying that I was seemed to be suggesting that there isn't a great deal of critical thought around and um that doesn't match with his experience his colleagues his peers are critical and think for themselves my view is that we all are philosophers to some extent and we have a huge history of philosophy which you can draw on or not um people may children are naturally dra drawn to asking philosophical questions and debating philosophically whether it's naturally or not but they do this from an early age sometimes they lose that I think it's philosophy all around us so I'm not um the kind of person who thinks that philosophy is set off in a little academic world that's the first thing I'd say secondly perhaps in as much as they are critical thinkers in the way you described they are doing philosophy and you may be in a privileged position of electrical engineers Highly Educated people who have to think in a at least in an analytical way about what they're doing and it may transfer to other areas of their life but there are huge numbers of people who are and all of us who are dramatically influenced by what happens to be around them it's quite difficult to be an eccentric dissenting voice in a group of people that is psychologically demonstrated there have been many studies about sorry an emotion an emotional aspect yes certainly there's an emotional psychological effect of being in a group which makes it difficult to disagree in many cases it's not just this actually it's it's more than that it's more than the what other people think there are lots of um unconscious influences on our Behavior there's some great studies about um the way that people act in relation to um charity giving money to charity as soon as that was the topic I mentioned people are more generous if they just found a dime like a very low value coin in a telephone kiosk they were more generous if they just found a dime that somebody an experimented left there than if they hadn't um people who stood outside a a Bakers with a smell of fresh freshly baked bread were were better disposed to give to charity than people standing outside a dry good store a a hardware store they weren't aware necessarily they could even smell bread but these these environmental factors affect us a lot and we like to think of ourselves as critical rational beings but certainly the consensus at the moment which again might get us into trouble but the consensus among psychologists seems to be with people like Daniel caraman uh Jonathan height that a better model is of the um the irrational part of us dominating the non-conscious elements dominating so that we should see ourselves as a as a a rational tail trying to wag an irrational dog as Jonathan height has put it so I think we can be over proud of our critical abilities I think a lot of us um are swept up by other things and it's difficult once you're in the situation to to know the degree to which what you're doing is affected by other people and by environment right so so why would it not be instinctive when you know about um a child that you could help somewhere else I mean I'm assuming you don't give huge amounts of your money to char because most of us probably don't you might give some yeah so but it but is that a rational way to behave when you know that this is there are people in agony in Syria at the moment we could probably do something about that but we're sitting here rather than shaking a tin outside direct well that's another argument this check out Peter sing's book the life you can save I'm there an assumption that I'm not in philosophy I'm in philosophy in a in a heavy way believe me I spend every day I believe doing some philosophy whether it's um writing or or discussing philosophy or thinking about it that's so institutionally um I I really value face Toof face education actually it's a really interesting point we're at with um the development of muk's massive open online courses I think philosophy thrives on face-to-face interaction actions and a lot of learning takes place through discussions and real life situations I think there are things you can do effectively through distance learning and through online education in a sense we're in the business of online education that we don't see it necessarily straight forly education delivering um as it were a potential eavesdropper into a conversation about philosophy um so what can what we do within philosophy education I think within within universities I think what we need to do is get have a greater well okay the first thing teach people better teach writing philosophy as well as discussing philosophy teach writing as a skill put a greater emphasis on Clarity we we we as philosophers people often talk about the need for clarity in the Great Clarity of deart or whoever it is but many professional philosophers do not exemplify that Clarity in their published writing and they do not teach students how to write clearly some of them do but very few of them devote time to that imagination is not often cultivated within philosophy so there's there a sort of although philosophy is essentially series of open questions within Universities at undergraduate level it's t taught as if it were a set of closed questions so there are anticipated right answers to the questions that are asked um so narrow questions are asked and people aren't stimulated in ways to get beyond the conventional ways of thinking so often then it's a huge jump from an undergraduate degree to do postgraduate studies where there's a demand to be original in some sense um so those things are important I think the um self-centered focus on my research that many academics have can be misguided I think if more philosophers saw themselves as principally teachers who do research that would be wonderful for philosophy um but I don't think there's any easy solution I think it's it's caught up in a kind of strange scholasticism at the moment it's not the whole of philosophy I've been my wife used to describe me as a as like a Vicor who'd lost his faith in relation to philosophy but carried on a job I've left it now um but i' i' I think through through philosophy bites which I make with David Edmund here um I've met some of the most amazing philosophers alive who talk lucidly about quite difficult subjects are completely committed to understanding philosophically and their enthusiasm and ideas are infectious you can't be in the room with these people and not be excited about philosophy because they are they're thinking on their feet they you could can see they really care about it and they've got interesting things to say that for me is the LI that life in philosophy is fantastic um so that if that could be what goes on generally in philosophy departments that would be fantastic that would be superb um what actually goes on quite often is people read papers at each other which is a a kind of Torment um they read verbatim when they're in the room with each other for three qus of an hour an hour and a half they just read badly from their paper that they're about to publish and then take a few questions which they've already know the answers to and and then go home or go to the bar U which is terrible big waste of time and public money I would say one of the things I do is I I I quite frequently give talks in schools and what's been striking in The Last 5 Years is the way that philosophy has grown as an a-level subject Within schools and as level but also within religious studies which is getting to be larger than English literature in many schools the the number of students in sick forms who are studying religious studies they're not many of them are not religious themselves but there's a large amount of philosophy within the religious studies um a level syllabus and that that's result in thousands of um students across the country getting really interested in philosophy I think I don't think going back to the previous question um most philosophy departments have an eye on that I think they they they see it as something that shouldn't really um be of interest to them where in fact there could be a great deal of um flow of expertise or um teaching going from the universities into the sick forms but but I don't see that happening so much I think often the people who go around and speak in schools are of are independent philosophy um writers and so on rather than the academics in in the universities it's very difficult to talk about the British school system um having extra time for making connections when as we all know it's everything is being shifted towards passing exams learning facts that go wants us to learn that we're good for him on University Challenge and so on so I don't for me that's that's the antithesis of philosophical um education because it's treating education as something that has to be banked something that has you know you build up a stock of cultural knowledge for me that's not what philosophy is at all so it would be at odds with that the direction that um seems to be being imposed from a b in British educational contexts um I think philosophy is great because it can work alongside other subjects and thrives in asking questions questions about those other subjects questions that arise from science or from from literature or from um practical subjects like art as well um so I think it works very well alongside other subjects there's no reason why intrinsically why it shouldn't be integrated but I just don't hold out much hope for that in the with the current um direction that education's moving in I'm just trying to find a career for myself that position um um what advice would I have be creative I guess that don't don't see look obviously you can be you can teach the some of the most inspiring teaching of philosophies is going on in primary schools I've seen there's a guy called Peter Wally who teaches teachers how to teach philosophy to Young children I've been I've seen some of his um methods in action he's it's AB absolutely fantastic and very um uh dramatic conversations take place as a result of this things you wouldn't imagine that a 10-year-old would be able to discuss discussed at a level that could be almost in a seminar in a first year undergraduate course um so so you might think about going into teaching I think you transform people's lives very dramatically there also you get long holidays where you can do more philosophy writing if that's what you want to do I don't know it's like being a poet isn't it it's it's not easy to make money from poetry um you have to make enough to live from as a poet um maybe get a a job in the city Isaiah Berlin one of my favorite quotes from him trous quote was that um a philosopher is a grownup who's paid to ask childish questions I think it's quite a good summary where your job thank you well I don't have a job but I see myself as a writer you see I think um amongst other things than podcast maker but there are all all kinds of opportunities opening up online and a lot of people assume that you can't actually write philosophy online and get paid for it but that's false there are lots of new places that are emerging which will pay you to to write philosophy to to make audio philosophy whether you can make a living at that depends on whether you get you get the large enough public attention and and money flowing from from whatever source that way but there are paid opportunities but I'd say um it's for each this is the the SRI answer you have to choose and make your own decisions for yourself I can't tell you how to do it you're free go and do find a way to do it if you really want to do it I'm sure you can find a way to survive look most people survive if you don't we don't need that much money to study philosophy they're many amazing resources you can get access to for nothing online in philosophy in terms of the great works of the past if you want to study David Hume um all his works are online just about um dav.org that Peter milikin runs has got fantastic resources you don't have to own copies of the books sorry to say this but that's but at the same time I should say that there is a moral imperative to buy books by living authors especially philosophy books when the philosophers are in the room you know