Julian’s been on the radio again – in fact he seems to have been on aproximately every other time I listen, lately. That one’s Night Waves and it’s only good until tomorrow, because it’s last Monday’s show and I didn’t know about it until yesterday when I happened to browse the Night Waves page to see what I’d been missing – otherwise I would have told you sooner.

I transcribed one bit because it sort of fits with various things we talk about here from time to time. The interviewer asked how useful philosophy can be, does it change people’s thinking, and so on.

I think it’s possible to read a hell of a lot of philosophy, it’s possible to be a professional philosopher, and not have a philosophical attitude. I think the philophical attitude is this kind of constant questioning, and I think that sometimes people find philosophy, they love it, and they latch onto a few of their favourite philosophers, and they become as entrenched in a particular form of philosophy as any unphilosophical person becomes entrenched in their assumptions; philosophers are actually subject to the delusion in fact because their subject is officially the ‘queen of the sciences,’ the discipline which questions assumptions more than any other, they kind of feel that they themselves are immune to the kind of dodgy reasoning and stupid assumption-making that the unwashed masses do, and I think that’s a terrible risk of doing philosophy.

Good point. Let us all take a solemn vow (on a bust of Socrates if you happen to have one, or Hume, or Sponge Bob) never to feel that we are immune to dodgy reasoning and stupid assumption-making.