Nigel Warburton

I’m actually torn on this. I agree with most of what Julian Baggini says in his Opinion piece. But I also believe that just as different idioms in writing suit different occasions, different styles of dress are appropriate in different circumstances and that as social beings we need to be sensitive to the messages we give off by the way we choose to dress. I wouldn’t want to force anyone to comply with a dress code, and have been irritated by invitations which stipulate it; but I do believe it is sometimes useful to know what an organiser of an event is expecting in terms of what people wear - then if I choose not to wear that, it is not as a result of misjudging the occasion, but a delib...

At first reading it seems strange that someone should claim that a child has a human right to be loved. As S. Matthew Liao points out in his Opinion piece, part of the strangeness comes from the view that love is not something that we can choose to feel. Yet, whether or not you are convinced by Matthew’s arguments about it being possible to influence or even choose our emotions, given that being loved is a prerequisite of healthy psychological development, couldn’t we argue that the child has this right, whether or not this love is actually achievable by those around the child? Wouldn’t that be similar to the situation of a child in a drought, where the child certainly has a right to drin...

The philosopher Martha Nussbaum wrote an interesting essay about (against) anger for Aeon.co https://aeon.co/essays/there-s-no-emotion-we-ought-to-think-harder-about-than-anger. Following Aristotle, she identified ‘payback’ as a key conceptual element of anger, and one of its more poisonous aspects. This aspect worth thinking about. Nussbaum’s desire that anger be considered a useless emotion (probably heavily influenced by Seneca’s De Ira) is, for me, idealistic and not realistic, particulalry in political contexts. I prefer the app...

There are millions of children across the world going to bed hungry each night and without adequate medical care or protection from abuse. That seems to me something that needs urgent attention. Similarly a global response to climate breakdown is something that needs co-ordinated agreement about how best to act, and soon. I suspect the technological difficulties of setting up habitable large population cities on Mars will stump scientists for a good while longer than you do, and the immense travel costs will make your future scenario an unlikely one. It might be interesting to imagine this scenario for the purposes of reviewing our political systems on Earth, though - a kind of sci-fi sta...

I’m not sure that the rhetoric of using the term ‘Intellectual Property’ is the main problem in relation to copyright of writing. It seems obvious to me that the 70-year postmortem copyright arrangements that we have in Europe (the result of homogenisation with German copyright law) are a bad compromise. This is far too long. Ten to twenty years from publication date would be better. But there were practical reasons why a shorter copyright period could not be negotiated. There have been a number of attempts to dismantle copyright, by Lawrence Lessig and others, but it is generally something that benefits both the publishing industy and writers (both from primary licensing, and then, also ...

Philosophy is enquiry. That’s the impetus: wonder at the world that leads to speculation, reasoning, debate, always with the view of getting more precise, more accurate, and more interesting viewpoints on reality, or at least discovering that such things are impossible to achieve. Philosophers ask questions and try to answer them. They want to discover how things are, and whether it’s possible to discover how things are. It’s true that in the Ancient World many philosophers set themselves up as gurus and purported to be able to teach their followers how to live better lives. Yet, to take one typical goal, namely to know yourself (or know yourself better): there is no guarantee whatsoever ...

In some of the sciences, it is unlikely that an individual could easily remain a competent generalist for long. There is simply so much to grasp, so many details, new research to keep abreast of. But in the Humanities and some of the Social Sciences it is still possible to be a Renaissance man or woman and that is a good thing. In my own subject Philosophy, there is a tradition of some of the very best philosophers making contributions to several areas of philosophy. Wittgenstein made contributions to discussions of mind, language and much else besides. Popper was influential in both the philosophy of science and in political philosophy. Nozick worked on epistemology as well as political ...

It’s great to be reminded of such stories of hope. It is easy to adopt the more sceptical line that most people are unaffected by good arguments that threaten their core beliefs, and that to believe otherwise is wishful thinking. I’m very tempted by the sceptical position myself, but acknowledge that complete scepticism is probably unwarranted. Bringing people together in an arena that facilitates civil disagreement is key to understanding those who disagree with you, and from there to begin to appreciate the force of their arguments (assuming they have arguments).

It’s a pity Wittgenstein wasn’t clearer about what he meant by his later remarks about religion. I know he didn’t want to spare us the expense of thinking for ourselves, but the result is that his views are extremely slippery and open to multiple interpretations. Stephen points this out early on in the Essay. It’s great to have such a clear analysis of several views commonly attributed to Wittgenstein - much better than simply gesturing towards ‘the Wittgensteinian position on religion’ as some writers do with all the ambiguity that that involves.

The hyper-active agency detecting device (HADD), otherwise known as the human brain, provides a plausible explanation of why belief in supernatural beings is so widespread. That and the effect of the stories we are told as children by adults who believe or half-believe in ghosts, gods, and the like. It’s very hard to eliminate the tendency to look for supernatural explanations. Yet, as David Hume pointed out in the Eighteenth Century, in his essay ‘On Miracles’ we should try and proportion our belief to the evidence, and in the case of the apparently supernatural there is always going to be a greater weight of evidence supporting the idea that there is a natural explanation for any phenom...

It would be interesting to know to what extent this is an American phenomeon. Vermeer, Leonardo, and Rembrandt, are all capable of pulling huge crowds in the UK. Could it, perhaps, involve a degree of chauvinism in that the most viewed artists in the US are American? I suspect an Edward Hopper , a Rothko, or yet another Andy Warhol show would, like a Jeff Koons retrospective, draw the punters in the US.

The way this question is phrased implies that secular people can benefit from prayer. But it is not at all obvious that they can, whether as targets of religious people’s prayers, or as non-believers going through the motions of praying. So the wording of the question is question-begging.

As someone who was occasionally forced to recite the Lord’s Prayer at school, though an atheist, I am aware of how meaningless, and irritating that practice can be. Blaise Pascal in his Pensée addressed the question of how someone who really wanted to believe in God for pragmatic reasons (following the gambler’s strategy of avoiding eternal damnation and being i...