How the World Thinks with Julian Baggini
Philosophy and Identity with Julian Baggini
Join host Andrea for an enlightening conversation with renowned philosopher and best-selling author Julian Baggini, as they explore the intersections of global philosophical traditions and personal identity. Discover how Baggini’s book 'How the World Thinks' delves into the balance between individualism and community, cultural context, and the integration of diverse ways of thinking. This episode unpacks critical thinking, its ethical dimensions, and the psychological and embodied aspects of personal experiences. Julian reflects on memory, trauma, dementia, and the importance of continuous learning while discussing the foundations of our thoughts and identities. Whether you are new to philosophy or a seasoned enthusiast, this episode offers enriching perspectives on how philosophy shapes our worldviews and daily lives.
Check out Julian's website: https://www.julianbaggini.com
How the World Thinks: https://www.amazon.com/How-World-Thin...
How to Think Like a Philosopher, the book: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/...
How to think like a philosopher, the podcast: https://www.julianbaggini.com/categor...
In Our Time: https://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/...
#philosophy #world #thinking #julianbaggini #andreahiott
00:00 Introduction to Julian Baginni
01:10 Julian's Philosophical Journey
01:42 Exploring Relational and Atomistic Views
02:30 The Role of Truth and Respect in Philosophy
05:12 Julian's Scholarship and The Philosophers Mag
06:57 Global Philosophy and Its Challenges
11:17 Defining Philosophy Across Cultures
30:16 The Importance of Place in Philosophy
37:35 Balancing Individualism and Belonging
42:12 Integrating Eastern and Western Philosophies
43:01 The Concept of a Global Philosophy
44:21 The Mixing Desk Analogy for Moral Values
46:58 Dynamic Systems and Knowledge
48:24 The Process of Understanding Reality
58:45 The Ethical Practice of Philosophy
01:11:09 Personal Identity and the Self
01:21:29 The Role of Philosophy in Critical Thinking
01:24:20 Julian's Journey as a Philosopher
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Transcirpt:
📍 📍 Hello, everyone. Welcome back to love and philosophy beyond dichotomy. Where I try to explore. The pattern beyond paradox. Without discounting the paradox. Uh, trying to find connections between all these disciplines and ideas. That I see in my own work and research, but also the. We seem to be discussing in always, either fighting about in the world or. Being motivated by.
So today, is a discussion with Julian Baggini, who is a philosopher and also a bestselling author. So he proves you can be both at once. Believe it or not and. you'll see why as you listen to this conversation, because he's very good at presenting. Difficult ideas in a way that
do not feel difficult. For example, we talk about, relationality and this atomistic view of the world, which. And philosophy and science. skin. Just feel like a black hole in a way he just kind of gets stuck in it.
But here,
we discuss it in
a way that relates to, for example, the boundaries between life and death and. Patterns of being patterns of thought. Uh, how we can expand beyond. Traditional. In our case, Western notions of philosophy, because that's kind of how we developed and within that world, but there's so much. More to the world. Then those philosophies and his book is an exploration of that. And this conversation is an exploration of that. He gives a very beautiful example. Of what I think of as paradox in the pattern. Beyond it that holds it without discounting. Its. The fact that there are differences. He reminds me that even though we do have very different, unique spatiotemporal paths in the world. That, that doesn't mean we don't. Share truth. You can almost think of truth more as the. Regularities of the landscape that we're seeing all differently and trying to figure out. There's so many interesting subjects here that we get into also just
in terms of how, how he writes and career issues for those of you philosophers, just starting out. We get into that a bit by the end. Uh, but it's just a great conversation.
I'm really thankful to Julian for the work he does and the books he writes. And I'm also very glad that you're here today. And hope you're having a
beautiful day, wherever you're making your way out there. Uh, all right, let's go.
Hi Julian. It's so good to see you. Thank you for coming on the show today.
📍 📍 Uh, thank you for inviting me Andrea.
So, I want to start with this book, congratulations by the way How the World Thinks.
Thank you.
It's a bestseller, which is, is that your third bestseller?
No, no, it's the second actually.
Oh, the second. Yeah, but there's a big gap between this and the first, because the first was, The pig that wants to be eaten, which is about 2003 or something. So you Oh, wow. Yeah.
Yeah. I was just remembering your first book, or at least the first one I read and how we met, which was a really long time ago and it was also had thinks in the title right? It had like an apple on the cover.
how to think Like a philosopher or, no, that that's the most recent one. No, that's the recent one. Recent one. What philosophers think. What philosophers think. What philosophers think. Yeah. Exactly. The other one I
have back here, which is the newest one, which might become a bestseller too.
You never know.
Well. We live in hope.
So I just want to start with, maybe it's a little bit of an annoying question. I'm sorry if it is. But. You can tell me. But when we talk about how the world thinks, we're talking about the human world, right?
Yes.
Yes,
we are. Yeah, yeah, no, no, it's not an annoying question.
It's something that I guess people assume to be the case, they don't even ask the question.
Well, these days sometimes, you know, there's all these ideas about plant cognition, animal cognition, and a lot of our neuroscience classes these days, you know, those are entire classes. So that's kind of why I I wondered if you'd even, like, considered that or just crack at that.
Well, I mean, it's interesting. I mean, you know, you sort of um, the title, I hadn't really thought how the title could be, uh, interpreted in a different way to mean, you know, how Gaia thinks, I guess, you know. No, I wanted to do a book on global philosophy. And global philosophy is a human artifact.
So, I didn't even, wasn't even on my agenda to think about, uh,
plants
or other, how other animals think.
Well, that makes sense because philosophy is a human endeavor, but so what, what made you want to do this? And this is a, Quite a big adventure you went on it sounds like you're not really in the book But you are in the book kind of in the background I can we can tell that and you say it at the beginning a bit that you did travel So I wonder where this idea came for for the book
Well, you know, I think sometimes I've come to the conclusion perhaps that sometimes the most interesting books are Not the ones where the author is setting out Uh, all that they know.
It's rather where the author is trying to find out something. And, uh, shares that voyage of discovery shall we say, with the reader. Because, you know, I've been writing about philosophy, I've been doing philosophy, really, all my adult life. But when you do philosophy and you've been educated in a British university, you are doing Western philosophy full stop.
And, uh, non Western philosophy shall be. It's not necessarily explicitly disparaged, but it's seen as something else, it's different, it's just, whatever it is, it's not what we do. I think there is often, also, a belief that it is not really philosophy, right? That it's kind of, it's more, I don't know, cultural thought, religious thought, whatever it might be.
And, you know, over the years, of course, I've been aware of non Western philosophy, and I do talks, and sometimes people ask me why I don't know more about it. And I think my, my comfort with knowing so little about it was decreasing. And I, I thought that, I, I was persuaded that I really ought to know more.
And, uh, I mean, actually you can think, I can think of, uh, some particular prompts. Perhaps the, the, the prompt which was perhaps a straw that broke the camel's back, perhaps. I don't know. I'm not sure about the chronology of this. There's an article written by Brian Van Norden and his colleague. I apologize to the colleague because I'm terrible at remembering names.
I'll try to find it.
Yeah. And it was really sort of saying they'd been trying for years to Get people to teach more non western philosophy and they went through all the reasons why people said they didn't etc And they said, okay, look we give up but at least from now on have the honesty call yourself the Department of Western philosophy At least do that, you know, just be clear about
it
But but their explanation of why you know, the the unconvincing replies people gave as to why they shouldn't bother Uh, they did seem unconvincing.
So I thought, listen, I need to find out more and actually, you then look around and you see that there really was not a book, not a single book, I think, which was aimed at the, you know, the general reader, which was trying to be global, had sort of depth, but wasn't, you know, uh, which was accessible. The nearest book I could come up is a very, David Cooper wrote a very, very good book on world philosophies, but it was very long.
It was, it is accessible, but it was, you know, pretty academic in style and tone. So it's like this book is needed and I need to read it. So in order to read it, I have to write it. So that's the long answer to your question.
Well, those are usually the best books, the ones we need to read and so we write and obviously a lot of people were interested in this.
It came at the right time and I think we've all noticed that there's been all of us who keep track of philosophy or do philosophy or just read philosophy, that it has changed a lot. Uh, lately to where people want to open up beyond what is usually called this kind of Western canon. But I, I, I, in your book, there's a lot of tension in doing that, isn't there?
Because in a way, uh, the whole idea, the word philosophy, sort of in the way you assume it's human, we just almost assume these, you know, particular parameters. So from where we are, from our position, it can be kind of hard, can't it? To understand where something like religion and philosophy can be distinguished, if they even need to be distinguished.
I remember in school, I, I was always interested in what is Eastern philosophy, but I had to study it in the religious department. And of course you go into this a lot in your book. So was that, uh, was that a hard part of writing this book or was it an interesting part both?
Yeah, well, no, it was an interesting part.
I think, I think It's difficult. I mean, it's what's very interesting about philosophy. One of the many things about, interesting things about philosophy is that there isn't a straightforward answer to what it is. So, you know, if you ask a philosopher, what is philosophy? And you'll get very different answers.
And often you'll get a bit of fumbling around and not really doing much. I remember there was one, I can't remember the, one of these 20th century sort of British philosophers who when asked the question, what is philosophy about? He simply gestured to his bookshelves, This is what all these are about, you know, which is not a very helpful definition.
So I think it's pretty clear that most, lots of things, particularly human endeavors and artifacts, that they don't have some essence which is pure and untainted. So we may overuse Wittgenstein's idea of this family resemblance concept. In other words, we use the same word for something because it has sufficient things in common for it to make sense.
Um, and I think that when you look at philosophy, Uh, well the thing is, if you look at philosophy within the Western tradition over its, you know, over 2, 000 years, there's a lot of variety in it, within it, too. So it's not like you can say anything clear about philosophy which will make it clear that makes it very different to non Western philosophy.
So, for example, the big one is people say, Oh, well, the thing about philosophy is that it's, it's not religious. It's independent from religion. That's just historically inaccurate, right? I mean, people will study Augustine and that's sort of like explicitly religious. It's not religious. Descartes was explicitly religious.
You know, Kierkegaard was explicitly religious. So the idea that there is this sharp dividing line doesn't make sense either. So I think, you know, you have to kind of nevertheless make decisions about what you include and you don't, don't include. Well, I think if I'm asked what philosophy is, uh, the answer I used to give for a long time was that it's a combination of a set of questions, And a ways of answering them. So the kind of questions it deals with are the kind of questions which are not straightforwardly answerable simply by accumulation of more facts, right?
So how far is the Earth from the Moon? Go measure it. Now, we didn't know how to measure it for a long time, but it's an empirical question, we know that. What is good? Uh, what is justice? Well, you know, you can't just go out and measure that. You could do an anthropological or historical survey about what people have taken justice to be.
But that's not doing philosophy as such. So we have all these questions which are, if you like, left over by the special sciences or particularly empirical disciplines. But then the way you answer them, I think, is important, it is important that philosophy is defined by its commitment to, to reason. Now, there's a big story about that,
but
all that means is that, you know, if you answer those questions by appeal simply to, uh, religious authority, or perhaps some insight you claim to have had through some spiritual experience or something, or just by what your tradition says, you're not doing philosophy Now, of course, what makes reason is itself another concept which is contested.
I wrote a whole book about that too, which is called The Edge of Reason. But I think the key thing about reason is it has a certain kind of openness and intersubjectivity, if you like, that if, if I offer a reason for something, it is something which you have the capacity yourself to understand and to assess and to test and so forth.
That's what makes it rational. If I give you a reason is somehow it's not possible for you to either understand it or test it or interrogate it then I'm not really giving you a reason in that strong sense of rationality. And if you understand that then it seems very clear that in all the major non western traditions there is something which is called philosophy.
They will have different views about Exactly what is within the domain of reason. They will have different views about the way faith and so forth fits into it. But that's okay, because it's within a framework where that is itself justified by reason. Okay. So, for example, you know, in, in, in what we now call Indian philosophy to describe, you know, the philosophy of that part of the world.
There is a certain status given to what might be called insight so and so what even called revelation. But the point is that that's within a framework whereby that kind of understanding has a rational justification. So you can reject the justification and there are some schools of Indian philosophy which did and claimed that wasn't a valid source of knowledge.
But it's not just, you're not just, you're not just told to accept it as a valid source of knowledge. And then get on with it. You're, you're giving arguments why it's a valid source of knowledge. And of course, in Western philosophy, you know, again, we have examples of things like that, whereby people will claim that, for example, the apprehending what is good is something that we can't give further reasons for.
We have to just do it directly. And they'll have reasons for that. So there are plenty of examples in Western philosophy where it's claimed that Four particular kinds of knowing, you can't rely on a rational argument, but there is a rational argument why you have to use that way of knowing. I'm afraid I'm giving a very long and convoluted answers.
Yeah.
No, but that's part of why doing philosophy is important in a way. And also what I like about this book and what I want to get into, or both the books actually, the newest one too, but I think it might be in the newest one. How to think like a philosopher. Where you, you talk about philosophy almost as like a practice or critical thinking itself as being something as being a practice, or I've always thought of critical thinking as being, I wish we all had to learn how to do it, because it's hard, as you say also in your books, it takes work, it's challenging, but there's something about the practice of it that you can do.
I mean you point this out in your latest book that, you know, it, it really helps like your quality of life, but also just connecting and all of these other bigger themes that, that you that you talk about. And you also talk about philosophy as being something philosophers are distinguished by not having a safety net or something, I think too.
It's kind of this place where we can. Uh, try out things, uh, investigate and try to develop some sort of rigor, I guess. But as I hear you talking, and just to come back to this book about how the world thinks, you start at the beginning saying there's something that all these, because you, you talk about really the world, you know, that's very new about this book, looking at philosophies of the world, which is very hard, but you somehow do it.
And you, but you start at the beginning saying there's this. kind of through line where everything is one ends up being a kind of message that we get in Greek and Indian and Chinese, in various philosophies. But that, as we get into the book, we realize it's really quite complicated, right? Mostly for how we, this critical thinking and so on.
So I, I want to just start with that, like that idea of everything is one being a kind of starting point of the book and then how we really start to look at that in a, in a, Critical thinking, was that on purpose? Did you, did you think about that that you're actually doing the philosophy of telling the philosophies of the world?
Well, no, I don't know. And I can't remember why I started with that. I mean, I should say that, you know, I had a chapter on that. I mean, what the chapters were going to be about evolves, as you, Look into, you know, what are the recurrent themes? And it was interesting that this idea of unity of a fundamental unity of some thought sort does seem to be quite a universal thing.
And also, I think the one reason I went for that was that's a very common theme in non Western philosophies, not so much in Western philosophy. Because I did, I wanted to, one thing that I really wanted to avoid was an implicit kind of, uh, what should I say? Privileging or primacy of Western philosophy.
Now, I think I acknowledge that to a certain extent it was going to have a privileged position because it was my background.
Yeah, you do say that. You make it clear.
Yeah, but I didn't want it to sort of be be more so than that. I didn't want, I didn't want Western philosophy always to be the, the reference point.
And with the idea of unity, I think it isn't, you know, because it's with particularly Indian Chinese philosophy that you really see that As a more central theme. I mean, actually, interestingly enough, from my own point of view, I mean, first of all, the big metaphysical issues are actually the ones I'm probably most agnostic about, I'm not sure about.
And I'm not entirely convinced I'm not sure how best to understand this, this idea of unity anyway. So it's not, I think that's why I
brought it up because the paradox you were presenting, actually, we start to realize that that is different. I mean, Because you go into something, for example, like the where there's no third way, the law of excluded, of excluded middle, which I think this, this gets to the heart of I mean, you, you can see the flip, right?
From a Western position of thinking about reductionism or atomistic thinking and how just, that's what we take for granted in a way. You're, that's a really flip from what you're presenting of this idea of starting with awareness and becoming more aware that we kind of get in other philosophies. Of course I'm generalizing, but you do start to see that that's actually very complicated to try to even understand what unity could be.
It's not, there's not maybe a beginning or end to it.
Yeah, I mean, you talk about sort of the flips and everything, I mean, it was, there were all sorts of traps you can fall into doing this book, and, uh, one is sort of just an over generalization, and an over dichotomization, I mean, I felt, in your introduction, I really had to make it clear that you know, to talk about Western, Eastern, Indian, there are generalizations you can make, right?
And that we are making, even if we don't know it. Yeah,
So, yeah, there are generalize, general, there's a difference between making a generalization and a universal statement.
So the problem is to say, Eastern philosophy is like this, Western philosophy is like that, in a way that implies this is universal. We have to accept there's a lot of diversity within each disciplines. But there are generalizations. Generalizations tell you about what tends to be the case. So, uh, the simple example you give of this, which is obviously true, is around sort of, you know, male and female, right?
There are generalizations you can make which are factually true. For example, around average height, weight, uh, fat to muscle ratios, all these kind of things. I mean, these are incontrovertible. It doesn't mean that every woman is, you know, Shorter than every, of course it doesn't, we know that's not what it means.
So we can make generalizations about the general trends in British, American, French, Chinese, Indian philosophy. As long as we are aware we're not making universal statements. But I think the other really important thing is, and I think the single most important book that I've read and every time I talk about this book, I always mention it, it's Tom Kasoulis book, Intimacy or Integrity.
Because I think he nails, he, he, he's describing a distinction, which he thinks is to do with Eastern and, Western and non Western philosophy, shall we say. And he has a very good way of getting us to understand it, and he says it's not about And either or it's rather the sort of almost quote him. He says what's foreground in one intellectual tradition is background in the other and vice versa.
So the great thing is, I think the good what he really alerted me to was that Very rarely do you find anything in a non Western, uh, philosophy, which, if you think about it, is completely alien. It's often just something which is not as salient, hasn't been given as much prominence, and, and, and you can, you can find it there.
And so, When you look at it in that way, it becomes very, very, very helpful, I think. Yeah, that's
a very helpful diagram that you give. I don't know if that's yours or his with the circles, where they're kind of overlapping and touching or separate. It's more atomistic. Yeah. Well, that's
the other thing. Okay, so this, this, this, so what I've described as the meta thing about comparative philosophy in general, that's about the specific different Orientations, he calls them towards intimacy and integrity.
Very, I mean, the words aren't particularly helpful, I have to say. They're difficult. I'm still trying to get
past it. I only read it for the first time in your book. But yeah, I talk
about I tend to put this about atom, atomized, and relational, right?
Yeah. That's more fun. The western
way of thinking is more atomistic.
It tends to always assume that the way to understand anything is to break it down into its constituent parts, and those constituent parts are the most fundamental level of explanation. And everything else is kind of built up from the bottom from them. So, you know, it's atomistic because that's the kind of paradigm of natural science, which has actually served us very, very well.
But it's kind of become the paradigm for everything else too. So, the great example we have in Britain, people, everyone around the world knows Margaret Thatcher, uh, who was prime minister during the 1980s. And she very famously and controversially said this speech in which she said there was no such thing as society.
There were only individuals and families and so forth. And society was just the word we use for the collection of these things. And it was interesting because people saw it as a bit of an attack on, uh, well, yeah, an attack on social cohesion and everything. But the general principle, I think, was one which, you know, does resonate with people.
That's kind of what people think. Society is nothing more than the individuals. Whereas the relational way of looking at things says that that's kind of a mistake because, well, not always, sorry, I shouldn't say it's a mistake. The relational way of looking at things is that to understand what anything is as an individual thing, you have to think about how it relates to other things.
So what's primary? So if you take you, Andrea, right? I mean, To understand what you are, we don't sort of like first start by isolating you from your history, and your environment, and your relations, and then think about how you might relate to those things. You are who you are. We can only understand who you are by understanding that you're a person who grew up in a particular culture, at a particular time, with particular parents or guardians, siblings maybe, in a certain community that you've dealt with.
done certain things in your life, you've been members of communities of learning of work and so forth, neighborhoods, you know, you are in a sense, the totality of your relations and that's how we best understand you. So the diagram you're talking about there is when if you have two, he has two overlapping circles and in the Western way of thinking, if you have two other overlapping circles and you.
Pull them apart. You have two entire circles. You just pulled them apart If you remove one circle on this relational view, it's like there's a little crescent left where it overlaps
It's like the missing piece from the missing piece. Yeah, and what I think is
interesting about that is one of the things I find interesting about that is that actually kind of fits a lot of our around people that fits our experience because when people lose someone who's very close to them they say it's like I lost a part of myself.
And I think the point is that we take that to be a kind of a very powerful metaphor. And I think the Casudis way of putting it suggests, well, it's a bit more than metaphor really. There is something kind of literally true of that. Because, you know, You are, to a large part, constituted by your relations.
And so if those strongest relations are sundered, a part of you is quite literally taken away. So I think that's true. Yes, apologize for using the word interesting, by the way. I use the word interesting all the time.
That's very interesting. No This is, uh, really true, and it can go the other way around, too, that you can never, like, once someone, once someone has become part of your life, be that, you know, even if it's someone like Leibniz or Spinoza or, but especially when it's a person like your father, your mother, your lover, your, you know, they're also always part of you too.
So there's this kind of way in which. when they're gone, something is gone, but also that they're always, that they've changed you and they're with you. So I guess why I'm saying that is there's a way in which like we could think of the, those are kind of 2D things on a page in the book, of course, cause it's on the page, but it's also, it's probably very much complex and more multi dimensional and there's many, many, many pieces there.
And in the book, I feel like in the same way you kind of started this discussion, you're, you're sort of shh. demonstrating what can't be said with words, which is another theme, language which is that actually both of these are true in a way in a kind of situatedness that you've also described via place, but it could also be a situatedness in landscapes of thought.
And because as you described it, also in my life, I've read certain books, I've been taught certain things about religion. I've heard certain conversations and all of that goes into my, my path or my blockchain or whatever we want to call it these days, that, you know, that That does what you were also describing so is that true?
Am I reading you right? That you're kind of trying to hold this, open the space, multi dimensionalize the space a little bit?
It's a nice way of putting it, right? And I think one thing you said there is, it's worth stressing that Kasuda says you don't have to choose between these two orientations. They're, they're orientations that we take up at different times.
The question is really sometimes which is the most appropriate one to take on a particular occasion, right? Right. But I think what you said Yes. I mean, I'm not sure, I just agree with what you, what you said, but what, what you said about these things becoming part of you. I think that's, that is so, so true.
You know, and I think, again, we see that most clearly with the people we are most close to. And it's a very common thing for people who are bereaved when they have lost someone close to 'em. They, a lot of people report that they continue to talk to them, right. And they, and they. Hear their replies now some people interpret that in a literal way They think they are existing in another world and they're communicating with them, but other people can have exactly the same experience But they understand what's going on as they have internalized so them so much that they could as it were Continue to kind of, you know, software analogy as it were.
They, their, their software is used to run in their brain, in their body, but by spending a long time together, it starts to run a bit in yours too. And that, I mean, that's kind of a cold way of putting something which is actually much more emotionally powerful. No, I think it makes sense even
if you think about language and how you learn certain patterns.
What's the example you give in a different context, but I think it's an aboriginal philosopher maybe talking about. patterning is the, is the kind of main theme. There's something about this patterning action that literally becomes part of you. And you, you, you're kind of playing those scripts, so to say, when you're talking to someone like my grandmother, for example, I can kind of remember what she, I can think of what she might say in a situation coming out of that path that was my grandmother.
Yeah. Yeah. That's right. That's right. And so in a way, you know, this is the sense in which I think. You know, we live on in, after we, if we live on for at least for a short while after we die, there's no literal sense at all. Yeah.
Pattern is pattern is, uh, pattern thinking. This, this, this is, you talk about it somewhere, and it has to do with place, the placeness and the situatedness of it, which is a theme I do want to bring up here, because You literally traveled to these places and I wonder how important it was for you to travel and embody geographically, not only in text or not only in conversation, maybe you could have just had, you had a lot of conversations with a lot of people who are, you know, really schooled in this.
You're not just trying to come up with these ideas yourself. So how important was the place for you and, because it's, it ends up being where we come to in the book in a way, and it's, it's a theme that resonates with me. there a lot. And I think it also has to do with what we're talking about here, about this, when do you choose the right practice or the right angle, the atomistic or the integrated, when you're trying, you know, has to do with what you're orienting towards.
Okay. So, yeah, I mean, it's worth stressing what you say. I mean, I kind of approached this as someone who, I didn't set out to become an expert in global philosophy. I set out to speak to experts in the various things and bring it together.
So
that's right I'm, not sort of like trying to overreach the travel aspect was interesting.
How important was it because I think I think it helped in two ways it probably Wasn't strictly necessary and I actually have to say that I've become a little bit sort of fed up with It's become a bit of a cliche now for serious nonfiction books to focus on the journey of the author As though that were the most important thing when it really isn't You know, and sometimes it's all it does is simply reveal how I don't know how little the author knew in the first place.
There's a, there was a book the Sea Spiracy book, I think. Uh, a film, sorry. It's a documentary about, you know, serious issues about what's going on in the seas. But it was told through the perspective of this really naive young guy who set out to make a film. And you kind of thought, you know, well, he arrived and show how amazed and surprised he was.
And they go, didn't you do your research? You know, that's not the interesting thing that you're surprised.
I know what you mean. It's kind of an easy plot. Uh, just say, okay, well, it's going to be a journey and that's going to be the plot. Cause everything's a journey. So it seems to make sense.
So, I mean, I thought, but I think, I think there were two, there were two ways in which it helps.
I mean, one is. Well, I think it helps for me and the reader in two ways, that by traveling I was sometimes able to come up with or just stumble upon some sort of cultural Examples, because I was very much interested in the way in which cultures reflect the thought and vice versa. So this wasn't just like a history of philosophical ideas that you'd only, uh, only of interest if you were interested in philosophy.
If you understand a bit about Chinese philosophy, you understand a bit about China. I think there's, I only had three pages on Russia, which is a shame, but, you know, but to be honest, you know, if you understand a little bit more about the history of Russian thought, you understand a lot better what's going on in Russia now.
Well,
you make it, you make up for it with Dostoevsky quotes in the next book.
Yeah, yeah, okay, yeah. So, it, it is a window into culture. That's the key thing. And by traveling, I think I was able to just sort of like spot things and put things in there, which clarified it to myself, but also hopefully made it, you know, Evident for the author.
Sometimes they're little details, which I could never have got just by being here. One thing that comes
to mind is the Islamic, uh, philosophy, religion difficulty and that kind of conversation that you overheard. I think that's the one.
Oh, yes, there was. It just lays it
out very perfectly. Yeah,
in that you had the debate, you know, the tension between, you know, how much is Islamic philosophy actually essentially connected with religion or not, and how much is that a problem?
There's almost literally a kind of a, as close as you get to a proper fact, Fight at an academic conference. Yep. Two experts from From that, from that
situation and context, not from the Western one. So it's very helpful. That's
right. But I mean, one of my, I think one of the favorite examples is such a little one was when I was in Japan and I was only in Japan very, very briefly, but there was this wonderful sign I described whereby.
It has a picture of somebody with, with headphones on and there's nothing around them and someone else with headphones on and there's noise coming out. And it says that, and it had it translated into English, it said something like, music emanating from the earphones is just noise or something like that, right?
Yeah, it's a very gentle way of, yeah. Yeah, calling attention to this loud headphone thing.
Yeah. Now it has been pointed out to me that it's not that in Japan you don't get signs saying don't walk on the grass, don't do this. It's not they don't do that. But the very fact they could have a sign which didn't give any instruction at all, it simply reminded people that noise from headphones is an irritant and that would be enough to stop people doing it.
And you do notice on public transport in Japan, That people are very, very, very, very courteous about other people's space. You don't get any of the issues you get on the New York subway and all that kind of thing. Everyone is given space. Everyone is very respectful. And I think that tells you something about that importance of the social.
It still has that primacy. If you go to something like Britain or the UK, we have become so now fixated on our individual rights that there is an erosion of that public space. It drives me crazy. Public parks, for example. In a public park, people think they'll sit down and they'll play their music really loudly and they think that why can't I?
I'm having a good time. If it bothers you, that's your problem.
People
don't think. Other people don't want to hear my music, you know, on, on the subway where people, you know, the music comes with the headphones or people, anyway. I don't know if you, I live in,
I live in, uh, Utrecht now, but I was in Berlin for a really long time and people had started just playing their kind of music without headphones as they go down the street.
I don't know if that's happening. It can
happen a bit and sometimes you do see people on the train, you know, watching a film on their laptop Yeah, not with headphones and you're thinking what's wrong with you, you know
Yeah, I think that's what that sign in the book that when you described the sign of the Japanese subway told me was back to that idea of space and place and how we think of even the individual as something, you kind of learn that through media that in, in my culture, the cult, from my path, this Western more that you, you're, you're supposed to kind of own your space, right?
And there's something about that, that you're almost showing that you have confidence in that you are an individual, which is very different from that sign. And the way that sign is interpreted in that whole section is, is very, is really um, interesting there too. And that kind of goes back to that Thatcher example that you gave too, where, and that was, you know, around the time when I was going to be born and come through.
And there is, that way, we're supposed to be individuals and that's what it's about. And you, you contribute as an individual. And of course, as you point out in In your books, I'm not sure which one because I read both of these closely, maybe both. That's kind of one of the problems that we're facing now. I think at some point you say that a lot of this what we've seen politically, that's just been difficult and challenging in terms of not being able to communicate or the populism ends up being a problem with belonging. How is that connected do you think? You, you, you look at a lot of that in the book, belonging and individualism.
Okay. Yeah. I mean, I think, I think it goes back to the point that these things aren't either ors. And I think that the problem is when you get the balance kind of wrong. And my concern is not the, I mean, I, I am product of Western culture and I think are therefore inevitably going to value.
certain aspects of its individualism. And I would find it very, very difficult. I wouldn't find it desirable to live in cultures where there was a lot less of it, where I always had much more pressure to conform. So it's not about, you know, but I think it's reached the stage where It gets out of balance and it creates a kind of backlash.
So in, in, if you think in Europe now and also in North America, the sort of nativist populist nationalism, I mean, this is, this is what happens when people are feeling like, uh, the world has been taken over by these rootless, Cosmopolitan liberal elites who don't place any value on community, tradition and value.
Then it gets asserted even more strongly and in ways which are not sort of healthy. So I think, I think the sort of, a lot of the populist stuff is a reaction against The kind of fragmentation of society that an excessive individualism has created. Now, of course, the point is a lot of these people who support these parties, of course, there are certain things around their own individualism, which they really value.
In America, I think you probably see this really strongly because on the one hand you have the make America great again nationalism, Chuck out this, that, and the other. But in America, you also get a very strong, we don't want the state involved, the individual should be free, etc, etc. So this is sort of like intention both to assert the supreme sovereignty of the individual over their own lives, but also somehow to assert the importance of nation and community and state.
And it becomes rather a. A messy, a mess where people don't really realize what the compromises and the balances need to be.
Yes, and I think to try to get into this messy nuance a lot of that is that we do still have this either or mindset. Um, not that we hold both of them and think that, you know, At some point, this might be right, or this might be right, and there's not only two, there's always multiple dimensions.
We don't think like that, it's very hard. So it's usually either or. So, in fact, as you just described it, most people are most things just in extreme in one situation or another. And so it's not that just like one party is individualistic, and the other one is not. But we tend to try to put it like that, and then we end up sort of fighting about, you about those things.
Do you see that? I mean, you talk about the platonic, cartesian path, I'll say, you know, that, that a lot of uh, these countries that we think of as western have, have followed. Do you see that as connected to this Uh, problem I mean, in the end, is it about all of us opening to one another's paths a little more around the world?
To balance this out? I mean, cause harmony is not an easy idea either in the book.
Yes. Well, well, I know these, these are, these are very big questions. I think, I think that, as, as you say, the kind of sort of dichotomous ways of thinking and black and white thinking, uh, are problematic because at the end of the day, the world and important things don't tend to be like this.
Uh, yeah
They've been very helpful too, as you show. So it's, even on this issue, it's kind of, you can't say one or the other.
Well, sure, I mean, you know, we wouldn't have computer programming without binaries. So binaries, binary logics is behind computer programming. Reductionism is behind most of the great successes in science.
But even there, you see, the point now is that even in the natural sciences, again, to prove this isn't an either or thing a lot of the most interesting fields in science now, I think, are the ones which are about the systems levels rather than the reductive levels. So, there is lots of very serious science going on, which is saying there's only so far you can go.
On a reductionism thing, you have to look at the interactions and the systems, etc. But maybe that's, maybe I'm dodging your question, but then
No, I think that's true too, because we're even trying to create quantum computers, which get past the idea of spatial web. So, there is some change, but here, I'll put it in a different way.
We could generalize this and say, okay, there's been one way of thinking in the West, which is, Either or based on platonic or Cartesian ideas where we think there's a mind and a body. There's a right and there are wrong. And then there's a more eastern way of thinking where we start in presence in some like in India or it's more about the feeling, the awareness, the consciousness.
And we start as. Uh, integrated or intimate and that is, that is life, and it's just about that. Like, so, we could think of it as these extremes, and is the point now to integrate those two things? Is that going to be helpful, or?
Yeah, well, as I said, I think it's about integrate maybe that's the right word, I'm not sure, as I say, it's about finding the appropriate place for each and, and, and, and, and to, to use, in a sense, they're two sort of ways, modes of understanding, modes of apprehendment, and to bring them, bring them together.
I think that's true and I think it's, I think it's kind of possible. I mean, if I do talks on this, a lot of a common question would be something like, do you think it'd be possible to create a single global philosophy? Could you, as it were, synthesize all the best elements? Is there, is, is there perhaps a perennial and singular philosophy behind all of this?
And I think, I think the answer to that is kind of no, actually, I think that we have to accept there's a fundamental pluralism about humanity, which means that there's always more than one way to do pretty much anything. It's more than one way to do anything. And one way, more than one way to think about anything.
More than one way to order a society. More than one way to live a good life. More than one way, perhaps, even to do science. It doesn't mean anything goes. There are certainly bad ways of doing things. There are wrong ways of doing things. But there will be be more than one right way of doing a thing. So I think it'd be kind of mistaken to think that we should ever expect there to be a single kind of a value system or moral order or political order that should work for everyone. But nonetheless I think that where we understand commonality, I have this analogy which is the most helpful one I can think of. And it is, I think it does help, it's helpful. So I, I think of, you know, If, let's think about ethics, just stick to ethics as it works best for this. The idea of this mixing desk, so what I'm asking people to imagine is If you are recording, let's say you're recording a, keep it simple, a 12 piece band in a music studio.
Well, the typical way you do that is that each instrument would be, have its own channel, and it would go into the mixing desk. And if you're producing the record, you have to decide at what level to set the different instruments, right? Because there might be times where you need to put, you Up the guitar in the guitar solo, perhaps you might raise the volume on the guitar, but if it was that loud through the whole song, it would be too loud.
And so you have this kind of balance. So this is what the mixing desk does. You've got 12 elements and you put them up and down. Now, I kind of think when it comes to most moral values, Most moral values are universal in the sense that you find them all over the world. What's different is the settings, right?
And the point is you can't turn them all up to ten. You can't have them all down to zero. They're going to be different settings. So, typically, for example, in the West, you know, we have a higher setting for values around things like autonomy and personal freedom. In, in most places, in the West in the past, and in lots of other places, there is a higher setting for kind of community and for, uh, you know, relate relational values, uh, etc.
Now there's no reason why we should expect or suppose or even hope that every culture is going to end up with the same set of settings. But understanding that we are working with the same basic set of values, and it's not about denying the importance of any of them I think can help us to, first of all, understand other cultures, but also learn from them, so that perhaps there'll be a little bit more convergence, you know.
So societies where, uh, I mean, let's take, let's just be critical of the rest, where the individualistic setting, we can see we've set it too high, right? We may not want to set it as low as it is in some way, like, China, well, China now, we definitely wouldn't want it that low, but, you know, as low as it is, say, in Korea, you know, but nevertheless, we, we might say, lower than where we are now, not as low as Korea would be right for us.
So, you, you might, therefore, hopefully, the most optimistic scenario is that by learning from each other we can take out some of the extremes, and we can all end up living in a society which all of us can look at and see as reasonable, fine, and, and, and good, but not exactly the same.
I like that answer.
It reminds me of, I think you talk of it as a multiple perspectives or a cubist or trying to really understand the yin yang, which isn't actually opposites because they're all part of each other. So, but when you're talking about that, it sounds, we could assume there's a thing that's knowledge that we're going to find or that we're setting.
But I wonder if you see it, you mentioned complex systems, dynamic systems, more as here's how I kind of was imagining it as you were talking that. Coming from a particular society, I come from the Western society, but as I've, uh, visited other landscapes, be that just through books, Eastern, books from Japan or Korea or China or India or wherever it opens up, uh, what I can imagine and what I can know and I can then, when I'm in a situation, I know there's different alternatives other than just those ones that I learned in my, uh, On my little path, you know, because now there's all these other paths and I can start to think, oh, maybe I could look at it this way or this way.
And then at that mixing board comes in well, because then you have a lot more tools to negotiate whatever situation you're in. And I guess that could be true for any of us, no matter where we're situated around the world. But then knowledge isn't a static thing, is it? It's Because it's, uh, as I'm doing that, I'm changing what's possible, what knowledge can be possible, what I can imagine.
So, that question you get asked, uh, could there be like one set way, almost doesn't make sense, because there would always be so many moving parts, uh, about, about that, that we're all constantly having to renegotiate.
Yeah, yeah. Well, I think You know, it would be hard to imagine a point at which our understanding was, was finished.
I think it's perhaps where it is helpful, one of the more helpful kind of themes you get, particularly in Chinese philosophy. East Asian philosophy in general, actually, is this sense of the fundamental nature of reality as being something which is in a process. It's not static. It's not fixed. That's a, that's a, that's a contrast which A lot of people have remarked upon.
So again, go back to Plato. There's kind of an idea that ultimate reality has a kind of unchanging permanence to it. And our goal is to sort of recognize what it is and then approximate to it. Whereas, you know, I think in most East Asian thought that is, things are in process, things are in flow, so there would never be some final state.
And, you know, I think that we don't have to sort of You can get a grip on this simply by thinking about, okay, let's put it this way, human culture and society has evolved and changed and will continue to change. And as long as you accept the basic plausible assumption that as the material and physical and social conditions change, so too might some of the ways in which we have to live and think in it, then you can see that, you know, Just as we would say it'd been terrible if we were still thinking as they did in the 18th century in the 21st century We have to assume that for people to be thinking as we do now at the beginning of the 21st century It's probably going to be inappropriate in the 23rd now There's going to be plenty that's continuous just as we look at 18th century philosophers and ancient philosophers And we recognize lots of things and we learn from them It's not like we have to chuck everything out, but it's the constant sort of evolution, I think, is really important.
So yeah, we have to think of we have to be prepared to see things as having a certain open endedness. And I think, going back, you know, perhaps relating the themes of the two book in a way, you know, that sense of provisionality, that we're never there, that we've got to kind of Keep at it is really important.
And the moment we think we have cracked it, that's the end. We've got the full stop. That's the beginning of kind of, you know, mental stagnation. There's the old maxim in business. They say, you know, in business, they say in order to even stay where you are, you've got to move forward. That if you stop developing, you're going to go backwards.
I think the same kind of thing goes with thinking. You know, as individuals and as a society, if you don't try to keep improving and keep developing your thinking, the quality of it is probably going to get worse. It won't just stay the same.
I think you show that very well in the second book, which we won't have much time to talk about now, but maybe another time, How to Think Like a Philosopher, because I think in there you actually say, if, if something seems obvious, it's not.
Or if it's not going questioned, that's probably a good reason to start questioning it. I guess, what's hard about this is that people want to go back to the idea of belonging or feeling sort of secure and situated. We do want that. And so, You, you quote Rorty a lot, I think, in these books Richard Rorty, who I've gotten a lot from, especially his earlier, or not the really late stuff, but in any case, you know, he talks about truths, like plural, not a truth.
But we can also go overboard with that, too, where it becomes, I think you talk about pluralism isn't it doesn't mean that everything is a, what's the word? It's not relativism. It's not the same. Relativism. Pluralism isn't relativism. Yeah. So there's also, you know, we're constantly having to kind of go to the other, other side of where we are too.
And remember that it's not a linear, easily contained thing, but things are, you know, There are real pads, there are real things that can be traced, that are truth. Yeah, yeah,
I mean, again, this is just so true, because I think that, again, people want things to be either or. And yeah, they think you've got to choose between the singular unshakable truth or Whatever is true for you, uh, and it's sort of a democracy of all truths, and clearly neither of those things are tenable.
It's got to be, uh, something in between. And time and again I find this, you know, I mean one of my books is on personal identity, you know, and it's the idea that
That's what you wrote your thesis on too, right? Yeah, that's my
thesis on, yeah, my PhD thesis. So, you know, it's a very common idea, which you, you know, Finding neuroscience, David Hume, Buddhist thought, there is no singular self.
The self is not this indivisible Permanent entity. It's a collection of things And that opens up certain possibilities But you know, I've had people sort of saying I sort of bury my head in my hands Yeah, because I try and stress this isn't the case that doesn't mean that Then the notion of the self is completely empty one that there's literally no sense at all of talking about the individuals And it certainly doesn't mean that we have absolute freedom to Constitute ourselves exactly as we want the fact that our identities are to a certain degree malleable changeable Not fixed is liberating in some ways, but we can't just imagine that we can be anything you know, that's that's kind of a
yeah for me gets to what you said earlier about the When you were describing the individual, uh, that, that kind of, it's not the self, but there is a, there is a spatio temporal literal, uh, path that I've had through life.
And that's also through all my knowledge landscapes. And according to that path, I'm going to experience my context. In a different way and no one person has the same path, we can't spatio temporally have the same path no matter how similar everything we experience might be on some level or how far away.
So it, there's a way in which we, if you can open it up and start to see it like that, you can understand that we're sharing the same space but we're not experiencing it the same way. Like, my parents didn't say the same thing to me or treat me the same as you, I didn't read the same books as you, I haven't been to the same places as you, so on.
And maybe that's kind of in your book or in a lot of, I sort of like to think, try to think of it like that. And that maybe opens up that space, uh, a little bit too, in terms of not choosing either or, but still believing there is, I have a truth and you do too. And how do we communicate about that and, and in so doing sort of change what's possible.
Yeah, yeah, I, I, yes, I think I, I think I, I get you there, and I think I agree, but you know, I think when we say you, you and I have our, our, our different truths we just got to be a bit careful what we mean by that certainly the case that we have our different experiences, our different etc, etc. What it can't mean is simply that whatever you think is true is true and I can't contest it and vice versa In fact, it's very important.
It's the opposite. I mean, I think that the point is that we only One of the things we underestimate have underestimated in western Philosophy is the knowledge formation is a largely social enterprise. We have this sort of image of the solitary thinker. You know, the philosophy works all out. It's all in your own head.
It isn't the case. Uh, challenge anyone, you know, to think about, make a list of the things you believe and everything and ask yourself, would it have been possible to even form those beliefs without other people doing some of your mental work for you? You know, and the answer is no. I mean, really, it always was. Sometimes people have found things out and explained them to us. On other cases, we have a very shaky understanding, which is based on taking the word of someone who we have reasons to believe, their understanding is a lot better. Every time you go to a doctor, it's kind of like that. So there is this kind of collective communal, Dimension to knowledge which is vital and so that's why it's really really important We don't think that it is wrong to challenge each other's beliefs We need to be challenged because that's how we get better at what we think, right?
I, I, I'm going to be right more often if people are prepared to tell me when I'm wrong Right? I'm, I'm going to be right a lot less if people just say, Oh, well, no, you have the right to believe what you believe. So if you say it's going to, it's going to rain and I know it's not going to, I'm not going to challenge that view, you know, it's crazy.
So I think, I think this is weird. I, it's, completely misguided to think that the way in which you show most respect for someone is simply not to challenge what they think. In a way that's not respecting them because you respect someone's capacity as a reasoner by assuming that they have the capacity to to respond to challenge either by having a good answer to it or by revising their views accordingly.
And I think it's also, it goes back to the theme actually of You know, global philosophy. When we talk about intercultural dialogue, I think that it's important to sort of understand what respect really means here. And I think sometimes people think to respect something, you have to be free of all criticism.
That is not your place to criticize. And again, I think that's just wrong. And actually, it's also, people don't genuinely believe it. Because a lot of people say that. Actually will be very, very happy and will actually want to criticise Western thought on the basis of the wisdom of non Western traditions, right?
So they think Westerners should absolutely be listening when, to Aboriginal wisdom, to Amazonian wisdom, or whatever it might be. But Westerners must not be critical of other cultures. No, we, we, we, what we should never do is wade in with great confidence, no sensitivity, no desire to understand and sweep aside and dismiss.
The views of other cultures, but engaging with them properly means being prepared to say, I'm not sure about that, or that seems wrong. And being willing to have yourself challenged too, you know, that's, that's how we make progress.
I'm really glad you said that because it is really important that we don't, I, that's part of what we're trying to maybe figure out is how to, and maybe that's what critical thinking can do and why we do want to know how to think like a philosopher in a way because it does teach you that it's okay to be questioned and it's okay to question and it's not questioning.
Some kind of it's not questioning some kind of essence or something that you have to defend. It's, it has to do with what I hope is changing the idea of self, too, to open it up a bit. That we're not just one self and we're, and we're part of this larger community, as you say. We're not solitary thinkers, even though we do have to take responsibility for our actions and our self.
But maybe there's some way in which if people can think like a philosopher or take some philosophy classes, as you do. It is a kind of practice, isn't it, to be able to take criticism and give criticism from a position that isn't, uh, judgmental or taking it personally, because that is not an easy thing to learn how to do.
Yeah, it's interesting, you sort of come full circles. I think early in, early in the conversation you talked about philosophy as a practice, and I think it kind of is, but I think what's important, and the thing I really, I think, try to stress in, in how to think like a philosopher, is that in a sense, It's a kind of an, it's an ethical practice, or it's a practice with a very strong ethical dimension.
People sometimes think that philosophy is primarily about, you know, sharpening up your logical chops, as it were, you know, getting, being rigorous. It's about the formal aspects of good thinking, and those things are all important, but I, I stress quite a lot in the book, the importance of what are sometimes called the virtues of thought, which is, You have to bring the right attitudes to your thinking and the right attitudes are things around things like a, a sincerity of intent, a genuine desire to understand more or to get to the bottom of it rather than a desire to vindicate yourself or to, to, to be correct.
A, a, a real determination and effort to where the facts are important. Getting the facts right and not just simply accepting or what you've been told as though it were Fact and also that perhaps another really key one is the genuine intent to try to understand Uh, the other, the person you're encountering with, the idea you're encountering with, to really trying and, and get behind it and, and get a grip on it, rather than sort of assume that you kind of know what it means when you first hear it, whatever it might be.
So it is, it's a kind of ethical, it's an ethical practice, you know. And I think that's why a lot of, uh, not all professional philosophers are good thinkers. And, and also why, Not just in philosophy, why, but there are some very, very smart people who are not very good thinkers, in the sense that they, they basically, Use their brain power instrumentally to get them to where they want to be.
If you've got a really powerful brain, you can do that. But that's quite scary because I think one thing we learned from psychology, and I think you have to understand psychology if you want to be a good thinker as well. Being a psychologist,
that's one of the Yeah, being
a psychologist is one of the big things.
Psychology tells us how we are very, very prone to self deception, to self serving reasoning, to confirmation bias, all these kind of things. So if you have a really clever person Who hasn't got the right set of motivations, they are going to almost certainly be able to come up with some very, very powerful and strong and convincing arguments for why they're right.
But they're not going to be right. You know?
Yeah, that's a really difficult thing too, is this kind of, once you, it is a skill to think critically and you can practice it and become really good at it to the point where you can bully others and also you can just sound like you know what's right and there's only this path, so.
But I do think part of critical thinking is you start to realize people can do that. Yeah. Once you, you know? And then you're on the lookout for it a little bit. Yeah.
No, I think that's right. I think, well, it's true. You kind of like, have to sort of like spot, the semblance of, uh, great intelligence for what is actually something else, which is often overconfidence and arrogance.
I think it's actually, and I think, you know, I'm prone to that, you know, it's not something you can ever sort of, a lot of these effects are really strong. Even today, when I meet someone who speaks with extreme confidence and erudition and articulately about something, you know, it's difficult. You find yourself thinking, oh, are they right?
Are they right? Actually, I had someone who, before it was published, I gave a talk about this, and there was someone who you know, whose family was from Indian descent, who Really sort of laid into me almost telling me that I was talking nonsense of it. And and again, they had confidence They're articulate.
They seem to know what they were talking about. They had a certain cultural background in it So and I know I sort of like, you know I did have to sort of go home and sort of double check a few things and you know, no, no I'm right, you know The point was and I could see then this was a classic case of overconfidence that this person simply I don't know, they, they, they were talking with, they weren't actually, okay, they were from the Indian subcontinent, but they're not philosophers and all that kind of stuff, and they were talking with an excess of confidence.
But, you know, it can really, really shake you. And actually, I should Yeah, it does.
It's almost like an inertia, you just, it's really hard to resist it.
I would say though, that was a rare occasion where the person of that kind was a woman. It has to be said, I don't know, it's probably cultural, I don't know whether it's cultural or, you know, but for various reasons, most of these excessively confident, arrogant people, uh, they're more male ones around than female.
Yeah, I won't, I won't go into that. There would be a lot to talk about with the whole male female thing that we'd have to have a whole other conversation. I think what's good to know is just that you did that, that you took it in and you went home and checked the facts. I mean, that's almost an example of what you're offering and how to think like a philosopher is.
You do take it seriously and then you check it, you know, it's not just because someone's confident that you say, Oh, they must know what they're talking about, which I think the more, like now there's so much going on and we have so little time, it feels like that we often just go with that, whether it's online or in person, you just kind of think they must know what they're talking about.
You don't even question it. You just go with it.
Well, this is actually quite important because I think how much you, you know, people often say, well, you can't check everything. How much do you check? When do you check? And you have to get the balance right. And I'm not saying that I always go away and double check when someone very confidently says stuff.
You know, you have to have a certain kind of reason to perhaps worry that you're right or wrong. But you've reminded me. So I think I've kind of forgotten, which was many, many years ago, I remember interviewing or speaking to a philosopher who said that what their philosophical training had given them was more confidence, as it were, to hold their ground in a way.
It's not, I'm paraphrasing a bit. But I, and I think I think, see that's kind of the wrong lesson. I think that's what does sometimes happen. Sometimes people do their philosophy. They think, I'm, I'm actually a good critical. I know how to do this critical thinking stuff. Thank you very much. So now if someone comes along and they say something which I don't agree with, I can just, you know, destroy them more powerfully than I could before.
I'm
so glad you brought that up it happens a lot that people become such good analytic philosophers or critical thinkers and then it just becomes a fight of who can be the better arguer which in a certain space is very interesting, but there's a lot more to You I think about and to worry about than just that.
Yeah, absolutely.
I think we're almost out of time. so, oh, we are out of time, but I did want to ask, uh, it seems that this changed you, the travel, the writing of this book in the first book, though, how the world thinks the second book, it's a different kind of book than the other books you've written in a way.
Is that, do you think so? I mean, There's a wider perspective in it I don't know, I wonder, did it change you, this thinking about how the world thinks? Yeah,
well I think, you know, I think that change is, in some ways it's depressing how little we change but we do. It tends to happen gradually but I think, I think that it, I think that it did change me in various ways, and I think that there's, perhaps the single most important thing is the one I alluded to earlier.
Which is the, I think that having kind of become sensitised to the ways in which a lot of typical Western ways of thinking are very compartmentalised and atomised. I've become much more, I think, sensitive to that sort of relational dimension and the importance of that. And I can sometimes now, I think kind of See, so that changes the way I think about a lot of things in that way, so I think that's been a really big, big shift.
There are other things as well, but I think, you know, the way in which we change is interesting. It's naturally generally quite incremental. You can sometimes have an experience in life where something so fundamental changes, such as you lose your faith in God or you gain your faith in God, that a whole load of changes flow from it.
But the point about our belief system and worldviews is that they, they are interconnected holes. And, you know, if you change one part, it changes another. And that means that in effect, usually it means that it's, it's very rare for lots of things to change completely. It'd be, too much would have to be disrupted.
But I think, I think it does. And I think, I think in general the way in which we change is fascinating. You read, funnily enough I read, I don't get to read enough fiction. And I, I was lucky enough to have, have an excuse to read a couple of novels recently. Very thoughtful, intelligent novels. And, you know, you have this kind of effect at the end of it.
It's done, it's somehow, it's tweaked your worldview a little bit, see the world a little bit different, and it's all incremental. And perhaps it goes back to this idea, you were talking about how it's important to see this thing as like a process. It's a process without end, yeah. I hope, I hope I never reach the stage where my worldview is not constantly being, my model of the world is constantly being tweaked and updated according to the new stuff I've come along.
But, but how the world thinks, I think was a, you know. A major reboot in the sense that it gave me that whole different way of looking at things relationally which opened up perhaps a big area which was missing in my thinking before. Yeah,
well what felt important for me is kind of at the beginning, I mean you're an expert in a lot of ways.
People would come to you as an expert, you're on BBC as an expert, you know. But you kind of say, hey, I'm not an expert on this, I'm going to go learn about it from people who know a lot more about it than me. There's something about that. Yeah. in life, if we can keep doing that, because we're all not experts of everything.
And it can be hard to do that, but to, to just realize, you, you say you're a little embarrassed in a way that there's this whole other area of philosophy, let's go learn about it. Yeah, yeah. That for me is a really wonderful gift or offering,
well, thank you.
There was other things I, I wanted to ask you about, but I think you probably need to go.
We are not this second, but if you,
okay, well, let's just get into this a little bit then, then we'll like, I'll let you go. But this idea of thought thinking, it's in a lot of your books, thinking thought, and this is all about how we think and knowing and. I'm not going to ask you about the relation between knowledge and thinking, but do you, are we just our thought, Julian?
I mean, in the book, you talk a lot about. Thought, and then, uh, in these other cultures, awareness, or something like being Attention, consciousness, those all get lumped together as almost like the same thing. But I feel like in the book, they're not always the same thing. So I just, I wonder if you have any thoughts about that.
Well, if I go back to the Personal identity issue. The philosopher that I was really, my PhD was writing the footnotes to was Derek Parfit, who's a very well known philosopher. And, you know, his basic view that personal identity, in other words, you are the person you are. Uh, as a consequence of the psychological connectedness and continuity over time.
Now, psychological connectedness and continuity, it really suggests that you are what's going on in your head, primarily. Now, I think there's something really important to that, but I think that there's a If you're a philosophical kind of person, there's a, there's a great danger you're going to overestimate the extent to which, you know, your, your experiences, as it were, are, are the primary of the intellectual thought.
It seems to be very obvious to the, we are, we are, let's put it this way, I'd put it this way, we are, The collection, the order, an ordered collection of experiences, essentially. But the point is, a lot of those experiences are not just intellectual, purely intellectual, or purely mental. Uh, they're, they're sort of physiological, they're embodied as well.
So some of Parfitt's critics said he underestimated the extent to which we are importantly embodied. And I think, He did and he didn't. He did, uh, not talk about that, but it was compatible with his framework. And I think perhaps again, perhaps again a change after the book is I'd say not just embodied, but you know, socially, physically, geographically, ecologically located as well.
So I think we are the sum of our experiences, if you like, but those experiences Can't just be reduced to little private, purely mental things. They're the whole of our experience, social bodily, as well as purely private and mental. But I think that is kind of it. I mean, I don't see what else we could be.
Because what else could we be on top of that, you know? Some little soul stuff. What do you think?
Well, just being, just, I mean, bodies, I think it's good you brought, that's where I wanted to go. But I, I think, uh, what we think of as thought isn't all of cognition. It's a little tip of the iceberg, you know, in terms of what we're aware of, this kind of language based thing.
And, and I guess what I'm saying is there's a kind of, you know, we could think of it as Kant with perception and cognition or something. There's, there's a, in the same way to how it's been difficult to talk about these either ors and there's no third way, but everything's the third way. There's a kind of way, too, where we confuse cognition and perception and the body and the brain,
well, yeah, I mean, I mean, there is a temptation to say we are essentially our bodies. We are these biological organisms. And I think that, I think what's true is that our experiences are very much dependent upon our bodies. I suppose it's also, what's also true is that you have to, we wouldn't be who we were without a whole lot of stuff which we are not directly consciously aware of.
So, to say, to say that we are essentially defined by our awareness is not to say that therefore the things we are not aware of aren't. vitally important, right? So that's where it gets a bit tricky. But I think the reason why at the end of the day you'd want to say that the body isn't the identity thing is the simple kind of thought experiment, which is that, you know, if I if I have a terrible accident and they're able to replace pretty much all the parts of my body with other parts and I come out the other end, I'm still me.
So, I need a body, and my body informs who I am, etc, etc. But, what, what would identify me as who I am would, has to be centered around what we call the psychological, or let's call it the experiential. But that's not to deny the absolute importance of the social and the biological in that. Right, so yeah, I would,
that's a kind of ship of Theseus, uh, thing, like how does the ship that starts on one side of the world, let's say it's a wooden ship, and then it's, by the time it gets all the way around, this is a long time ago, all the parts have been replaced, all the crew has been replaced, how is it the same thing?
I mean, for me that, that's interesting. It has to do with this, this path, this space, temporal position and patterning. Mm-Hmm. That pattern has been the same. So has the space, temporal space, temporal continuity. Mm-Hmm. And I don't see that that's different from body and brain and mind and like it, for me, that's, that patterning is not discontinuous.
You don. Do you don't separate it in a Socrates way like the soul is trapped in the body, but it's all kind of one patterning That's
yeah, I think that's true. But I think the point of I think what's critical about the patterning there's something critical about the conscious awareness aspect of that for a person because the point is this that If you go through your life as a single biological organism, but you experience some kind of brain trauma such that, you know, it totally erases your memories and transplants your personality, most of us would say that to all important senses of the word, the person who was in that body is no longer there, right?
And I think that's, I think that's, that's true. I mean, it's not a strict either or. You know, I think even being the same person is a matter of degree because we change over time. But there are some ruptures which are so strong. That it would be possible to say that even though the body continues to exist, the person doesn't.
And I think that's why you, you, you, you, you, it's not exactly the same as like the ship of Theseus. Because, again, there's a whole other discussion really. I mean, what, what's important for making it the ship is not that it has the same parts at each time in its life. It's that it has a certain ongoing structure, history, blah, blah, blah.
That's what matters. For it being a ship, what matters for us is very, very tightly connected to our awareness and our memories and our plans and our intentions and our beliefs, you know, without those things, we're not, we take, take away those things you don't have a person to, I can't say, you know, look, I'm going to offer you the opportunity to uh, be, I'm going to, I'm going to do something to you, which is going to give you, it's going to improve your, your, your capacities in a hundred different ways, right?
Uh, the only problem is the operation is going to eliminate your memories, your desires, your projects, your You wouldn't do it because it would be in effect saying you're going to kill me and use my body for something else. So that's why I think it's the experiential side is absolutely core to being who we are.
But again, I don't think it's either or, uh, again, this would be a big conversation, but yes, like let's somebody's changes their personality or their memory. There's some kind of like HM where there's a memory loss or there's still there's still continuity. We could still think of it as a ship.
Maybe the ship, uh, used to have some certain kind of kitchen capabilities that it kind of loses. But I think what the way I would answer that is in if we think of the self differently is not only like me or let's say my grandmother, right? When she, she did lose her memory towards the end. And she wasn't the same person in exactly the way you said, but she was for us.
So we were holding those patterns. Those patterns still exist. I still have them now in the way we talked about in the beginning. So, uh, I don't think it went away. It's just that the ability, the navigability, how she could make her own way, uh, changed. Like she, she was no longer. able to find her way at in the way she had before, you know, at some level, it was still, those patterns were still there.
They're still there now. Okay.
Okay. So, so because we should, because this is a whole other conversation. I do see, I do talk about dementia as an example in, in the Ego Trick, the book about this. I think the key point is this, that what you're saying is an experience, which I think a lot of people, and that, that's not true.
found actually to be true, that even towards the very end of the dementia, people do not feel completely that that person has gone. Now the point is you can understand that in, in a couple of different ways. One ways to think that everyone has some kind of like essence and the essence never goes. Right? I think that's the wrong way of looking at it.
I think what you'd rather say is that because we are a collection and a pattern and all that kind of stuff, as long as there is some degree of continuity, there is something of that person still there. And because the way in which we relate to other people is through bodies, etc, etc, you know, thankfully, you know, we can still have care for someone when at the same time we recognize they're virtually gone.
So I think there's a certain kind of There's almost an ambiguity there. There was a great example I had of someone I spoke to for that book, who, his wife had dementia at a horribly young age, I have to say. You know, it was pretty early onset. And I actually, he's very kind, I went and visited her with him.
And, you know, she barely recognized him anymore. And he was saying within the sort of community of people whose relatives have dementia they have this sort of phrase of like being like half a widow. So, you know, people have this question mark, can, are they free to have a new relationship while the person is still alive?
And, and it's this, it's, and this is this sort of like, you know, the holding of the two things together. There is a sense in which he is still the husband of this woman, in which he still loves her. And which he is still there for her. And there's a sense in which she's almost completely gone. She's not the wife, etc, etc.
And it's holding both these things at the same time. That makes sense if you do not see personal identity as an either or thing. As a matter of degrees of continuity, so I think that's the kind of point there, yeah.
And also to the situatedness that we talked about earlier, because my grandmother was a different person to me than she is to my father.
And you know, a lot of it is just that my story, it has been broken, not, not hers so much. I mean, it has for her, but in a way I can't really understand. So, I mean, there's a lot of different ways we could look at that. But I think it's a very important point. I mean, I think it's a good example of why philosophy is important in critical thinking because it matters on emotional levels, but it matters on ethical levels, and it matters on medical levels, how we, you know, try to assess and where all of that, you know, goes.
Really gets together, but well, I'll have to read that book and then we'll see. Is there anything that you really wanted to say that we haven't said or?
Oh, no, no, we could, we could go on, but no, it's been a very interesting. Yeah, I could go on and on. I didn't even get through
half my things.
I don't, yeah, I don't feel there's anything sort of pressing that I ought to have got out, which I didn't.
I've probably spoken too much already.
Yeah, no, no, it's been really good. I guess, uh. Just to, to kind of end it if somebody's never, uh, uh, thought about, uh, philosophy before, where would you kind of tell them to start with your books, by the way, or
any
books?
Should they
start with How the World Thinks, or should they lead into?
I mean,
I have to say in a way, I mean, I, I, it sounds, it sounds sort of arrogant, but as I say, I wrote How the World Thinks because The book didn't exist, and I think it should, so in a way it is, it's not a bad place to start, I have to say, but these, these days, of course, I would suggest maybe, you know, you don't even have to start with, with books the Philosophy Bites podcast series is very, very good, there's a huge archive there.
uh, 15 minutes typically with, with philosophers you know, and you get a good range of them, or even, even sort of going a bit more sideways, Kieran Setia's Five Questions podcast is a series of interviews with contemporary philosophers. And, you know, you get a good flavor, I think, of what philosophy is by, by hearing these people.
It's not kind of like, it's not kind of a history of ideas kind of podcast. If you're really feeling ambitious, you should, and you're interested in global philosophy, you should Get Peter Adamson's history of philosophy with no gaps podcast, which I think is now got about 800 episodes.
Oh, wow
Extraordinary, I mean he is I said what when I saw the book there wasn't there Not many people could really claim to be an expert in global philosophy There are lots of comparative philosophers who do Eastern and Chinese Western and whatever Peter Adamson has taken on the whole of global philosophy and has created this amazing, and there's some books coming out of it as well.
But I mean that, that, it will take you years to, to catch up. Wow.
I mean, I guess there's no end to that. If it's without gaps, he's just got to keep going and going. Yeah, exactly.
Without any gaps, I guess you're right. There's no way you can stop. Exactly. He'll just be fully, it'd be a fractal thing. You know, once you've got no gaps at that level, you zoom in and you see.
There's more. Exactly.
Well, Julian, are you, I wonder, you know, you've, you've always had success as a popular philosopher, but you're also like a philosopher's philosopher. There's not a lot of people like that. Was that an accident? Like, how did you become kind of a bestselling philosopher and still a consultant by the BBC when it comes to philosophy?
Yeah, okay, right. But you know, I mean, bestseller is a, is a, let's remember bestseller is kind of a technical term.
It refers to, you have, you've appeared on the bestselling chart in a week. It doesn't mean that you've been in, you know, et cetera. Let's not get too carried away.
Okay, but when I go into bookshops in the States, I see your books. When I go into bookshops in Utrecht or Berlin, I see your books. This is pretty unusual, especially today where people don't buy books much.
Yeah, yeah. Well, that is good. I mean, I think, I think there are, I think there are popular philosophers who have sold me. I don't know. I don't know because I don't compare or even check my own things. Look, it's, it's just there's no master plan. When I finished, when I finished my PhD, I wanted to keep, I've always wanted, I've always liked writing in a sense, you know.
If it wasn't philosophy, I'd be hopefully writing about something else. I was going to ask
you, did Tim Crane in that comment, do you think he set you on the road to becoming a writer when he told you, I can't remember exactly what he told you. Oh yeah,
yeah. Oh no, he was telling me, he was telling me that I had to sort of be a much better self editor as it were. I was already interested in, you know, I'd wanted to do that before. So I mean, I think, I think it didn't turn me on the path. I think it's just that I have never had a master plan and. I think the things have worked for me because I've never had a master plan, and I've also, thankfully for some reason, never had any great anxiety about how much I should be earning or where I should be.
Which is not, by the way, sometimes when you say that I think people don't get it. I think that means you must have some kind of private income or something. Which is very, very far from the truth. I didn't have any family. You're a secret
royal somewhere.
No, no, absolutely not. But I, I wasn't bothered. I was just, and I, I, I really only ever looked more than most about three years in advance.
If you, doing a PhD or something. And yeah, I started The Philosopher's Magazine with Jeremy Stangroom after the PhD, and that gave a bit of a platform which enabled me to write, and it built from there. So it's just been, you know, the old cliche, you put one foot in front of another, and then you put another foot there.
And
I've been very lucky. But there's a lot of luck involved, isn't there? A lot of luck
involved.
I mean, the pig that wanted to be eaten, you mentioned it, we mentioned earlier, did sell very well. And had that not sold very well I don't know. I could, might not be able to do what I do because you know, you're, you're, you're given the opportunity to write books on the basis of how your past ones have done, you know, and to have a successful book.
And at that stage in the career gave a little bit of a wind in my sails. Mm-Hmm.
Put you in the right community too, to continue. Yeah. So publishing wise,
so, you know, yeah, so I've, you know, I, I, and I've, I've stuck at it, you know, I haven't, I guess my
real question, I wonder. Do you let your interests and passion guide you?
Which I guess you kind of answered that you don't really worry about.
Well, I mean, yeah, but you, it's, it's, I wouldn't want to, not in a, in a purist sense, you know, you have to be pragmatic. If, if a publisher doesn't want to publish something, then You can't do it. So I, I couldn't afford ever to say, I'm going to write what I want to write.
And if the public wants it, great. If not, not. 'cause otherwise I'd have to gone and got a job, a cafe or something. 'cause I wouldn't have any money. But I think I've been quite fortunate in that I've been able to, I haven't never, I can honestly say I haven't written anything that I haven't wanted to write in some way.
And the, the projects which have been a bit more instrumental, they've still been worth doing. But they, and they haven't been. So I've been pleased I've done them and I've judged they weren't going to sort of so occupy my time there to distract me. But you know, you have to kind of, you have to have a certain patience as well.
So for example, the, I mentioned the ego trick book, that was about personal identity. That's my PhD thesis. I always wanted to do a book on that, but I was aware that In the early days, the kind of books that I could do had to be more general introductions because I had no, I wasn't established in any way.
So I had to, as it were, earn the right to be able to do that book. I had to be able to have a track record where I could convince the publisher that I was capable of doing that. And, and it would be you know, potentially one that would sell. And in fact, yeah, that has actually been one of the most long sellers of, of, of, of all of them.
Yeah. So it's a, it's a balancing act, you know, but I think I've been, uh, yeah, I think I've been quite lucky.
Do you work every day on something? Do you plan your next book? And like, do you have a kind of Schedule, or are you more, you put it all, go, go really heavy in it for three months and then off?
Well, yeah, I mean, I've normally, I mean, I'm at a moment in one of those rare situations where I just finished a book which is coming out in the autumn and I'm not working on a book at the moment. I'm trying to deliberately take my time before committing to something else. I have various things, ideas, I have various stuff where I've got material.
written sort of early draft and things, but I'm trying to sort of take my time a bit and think about what to do next. But there's always something to do because apart from books, there's always articles, reviews, things like this. So there's always something on the go. When, when I've got a book and I've got a contract to deliver a book, then, you know, you have the challenges to make sure the other things don't crowd out the time.
Yeah. So in those times I tried,
I tried a bit more discipline there. I think what I. Typically try to do is I try to say the mornings for the book, you know
Yeah,
whatever else is happening and try and make the morning for the book. Yeah,
that's good. Well, thanks for writing this book I've read not all of your books, but most quite a lot of them and this one I think really gives something that we really needed they all do but I guess because I just read it Maybe I feel Even closer to it, but it I think it's like you said, it's a book you needed to read So you wrote it and I think a lot of people probably want to read it.
So thanks. Thank you very much. It's been great
Cheers, okay