virtual philosopher

What Does 'Humanism' Mean? An Interview with Andrew Copson

What does 'humanism' mean? Some writers are intent on seeing similarities between all the things that have ever been labelled 'humanist'...but just because the same word is used, it doesn't follow that they have anything else in common, or are on a continuum. Does so-called religious humanism have anything significant in common with the kind of humanism that non-religious humanists endorse?

To clear these muddy waters, I turned to Andrew Copson, Director of Education and Public Affairs at the British Humanist Association (BHA).

Nigel: There is some confusion about what 'Humanism' means. What do you understand by the term?

Andrew: I think the Oxford Companion to the Mind has it right when it calls Humanism 'a morally concerned style of intellectual atheism openly avowed by only a small minority of individuals (for example, those who are members of the British Humanist Association) but tacitly accepted by a wide spectrum of educated people in all parts of the Western world.' This contemporary and widely-shared meaning, which the word has had now for over half a century, takes it to denote a non-religious worldview entailing a belief in reason and evidence as the ways of understanding reality, in human welfare and fulfillment as the aim of morality, and  in the capacity of humanity to make meaning and purpose for itself in the absence of any 'ultimate' meaning or purpose to the universe. This is the meaning of the word understood by the British Humanist Association and all the other national Humanist organisations in the world, and the meaning that is commonly understood in education in UK schools today. It is the Humanism described in books like Richard Norman's On Humanism (Routledge) or Jim Herrick's Humanism: An Introduction (RPA) and great books from the 1960s such as Hector Hawton's Humanist Revolution. Any confusion that there still is over the term, I think, is down to the word having had different uses at different points in the past, before it came to mean what it mainly means today, and this sometimes gives rise to misleading uses of the word.

Anthony Grayling on Atheism - audio interview on Philosophy Bites

You can listen to an interview with Anthony Grayling on Atheism on www.philosophybites.com. Grayling compares belief in God to belief in fairies...

Humanist Thoughts for the Day on iTunes

Think Humanist alternative 'Thought For The Day' podcasts are now also available on iTunes (including my one on death, Stewart Lee's on re-using religious myths and Anthony Grayling's on not tolerating the intolerant). BBC Radio 4 are still intent on providing religious propaganda without the balance of an occasional non-religious perspective in this slot - this within the 'Today' programme which is obliged to provide balanced reporting. 'Thought For The Day' now looks (and often sounds) like an anachronism. How long can this continue? It isn't the most pressing issue for Humanists, but it is still irritating.

Raymond Tallis' Annoying Choice of Book for Desert Island Discs

Raymond Tallis, (physician, philosopher, poet) is a model of good sense on the value of  science and what's wrong with pseudo-science and anti-science as for example in the podcast linked from his Times article.

He also won many hearts some time ago with his brilliantly titled Not Saussure which savaged trendy literary theory. On Radio 4's Desert Island Discs repeated today, his clarity and intelligence shone through particularly on medical issues about dying, and his choice of music included two bullseyes: Bach's Cello Suites, and Schubert's String Quintet.

But the deep mystery to me is why his choice of book for his hypothetical desert island soujourn was Heidgegger's Being and Time - one of the most obscure books of the twentieth century, which, though it obviously does contain some interesting ideas, buries them so deep in verbiage and neologisms that only the full time scholar has a chance of excavating them or making anything remotely comprehensible out of them (and for a sceptical reader like me there is the constant suspicion of being conned by deliberate obscurantism and even the philosophical equivalent of homeopathy). I suppose it is like taking a fiendishly difficult cryptic crossword on a long journey...I wish he'd opted for something by David Hume or Friedrich Nietzsche. Surely it would be better to take something by an undoubted genius such as either of these two (both whom were also superb writers) than a doorstop by someone who definitely couldn't write and probably wasn't a genius.

MP3 Mini-Lecture on Sartre's Existentialism and Humanism

You can download a 15 minute mini-lecture by Nigel Warburton on Jean-Paul Sartre's Existentialism and Humanism (1945) here: Download sartre.mp3.Sorry the audio quality isn't particularly high on this. I'm working on it!

You might also be interested in this: Philosophy Talk audio stream on Existentialism.

Secular Thought for the Day on Death podcast today

You can listen to my secular Thought for the Day. Here is a transcript:

I was on the train to London a few days ago when, as we were passing through a station at high speed, there was a disconcerting jolt … we went over something on the rails. The train carried on for a few hundred yards, and then stopped… and we waited. There had been an obstruction on the track, we were told, and we had to get clearance. An ‘incident’ had occurred. Nothing more specific. After an hour and a half of waiting, and learning that the driver had had to be replaced, most of us realised what had happened: someone had thrown themselves under the train.

At this point selfish concerns about being late for appointments evaporated considerably. Most people’s thoughts, I suspect, were with the train driver and with the friends and family of whoever had taken this desperate step. But not for too long. We had to get back to our lives despite having been unwilling accomplices in someone else’s suicide.

When we eventually pulled into Paddington, we bustled into the underground and got on with whatever we had to do. That’s what being alive is like.

It’s a cliché, but still true, that death is all around us, often painful death, but we are shielded from it most of the time. We rarely encounter death or even give it much thought. But perhaps we should.

As a philosopher I think it is something worth thinking about quite hard. I like the classical idea that philosophy should teach us how to accept death. But it can take a real death to focus the mind.

If, like me, you believe that death is the end of all experience, then there is great consolation in thinking that when it has happened there won’t be anything else. That’s it. Epicurus was surely right when he said: when I am there death is not, and when death is there, I am not’. As he pointed out, we don’t worry about the eternity before we existed, why be concerned about the eternity during which we won’t exist in the future?

Atheists often describe believers as indulging in wishful thinking when they claim that there is a wonderful afterlife to come. But from my perspective never-ending life would be a kind of hell that would remove meaning from everything I did, like an interminable piece of music that never reached its final chord. If wishful thinking is believing something that would be pleasanter than the truth, then this is a misnomer. I don’t want what the philosopher Bernard Williams called the sheer tedium of immortality  - even if it were an option.

What is bad about death is what it does to other people: the ones left behind to grieve, and experience absence. Slow death, and pain in dying are terrible facts of the human condition. But death itself is nothing to fear. Paradoxically, death, like love, makes life worth living…

Previous post on secular Thoughts for the Day.

Secular Thought for the Day

Now available. A series of secular thoughts for the day  podcast from www.thinkhumanist.org. I've contributed one that will be there from this Thursday (15th Feb.)...... Other contributors include Anthony Grayling and Stewart Lee. For an article in the Glasgow Herald including edited transcripts of Grayling, Lee's and my thoughts click here.

It is absurd that Radio 4 only allows religious contributions to this slot; just as it is absurd that we have unelected religious leaders with seats in our legislature. There was a flurry of debate about Thought for the Day when Richard Dawkins was allowed a secular one in 2002, but now podcasting is so easy, there are ways of getting round Radio 4's reluctance to cater for a  very significant proportion of its listeners to this slot. If this gets really popular, perhaps Radio 4 will have to revisit its policy.

Simon Blackburn interviewed for Virtual Philosopher

Simon Blackburn is one of Britain’s most respected philosophers, probably best known for his work in meta-ethics. He is also an outstanding populariser of philosophy who has written accessibly on a wide range of topics. This is a rare combination. In this interview for Virtual Philosopher he explains the source of his interest in writing for a wide readership and reveals his attitude to the professionalisation of Philosophy in British universities.

Nigel: Since returning to England from the States, taking up a professorial chair in Cambridge, you have been prolific as a writer of popular philosophy books: Think, Being Good, Lust, and most recently Truth. Is there a particular reason for this apparent change of direction?

Simon: Actually Think was published a couple of years before I left the States, and Being Good was finished before I did so. So if there was a change in direction, I suppose it was while I was in the States. It is a change of emphasis, I think, more than a change of direction. I have always had a democratic streak: one of my earliest books, published in 1984, was supposed to be an introduction to the philosophy of language (Spreading The Word). But I also like to blend some of my own attempts at philosophy into supposedly introductory books, so for instance that book was quite influential in its moral theory, and to some extent in what it said about other things such as rule-following and truth. I try to keep on publishing "professional" papers while I also produce books like these.

Nigel: David Hume in his essay writing saw himself as an ambassador from the 'dominions of learning to those of conversation'. Is that a position that you now identify with? Who are you writing for? Do you know who reads your books?

Simon: As so often, Hume puts it better than I could myself. Yes, that's an admirable description of a position I identify with. I think professional philosophy can be very odd, very self-contained and narcissistic and quite out of touch with more general cultural currents. Its writings, as Bernard Williams memorably put it, can often resemble "scientific reports badly translated from the Martian". I think good philosophy always has had to take some nourishment from surrounding politics, moral concerns, and science. It may be harder to identify what it returns, but in my books I try at least to exhibit something it can give back.

Nigel: What is the main theme of your latest book Truth?

Simon: It's the old battle between absolutism and relativism, although as I try to make clear, those terms are just pointers towards varieties of positions and varieties of issues. You could also see it as an attempt to come to terms with some typical thoughts of postmodernism, without either geting knocked over by them, or dismissing them out of hand, as is too often done.

Nigel: Has relativism had its day as an influential philosophical position?

Simon: No - and I don't think it should ever die. The danger is that it gets replaced by some kind of complacent dogmatism, which is at least equally unhealthy. The Greek sceptics thought that confronting a plurality of perspectives is the beginning of wisdom, and I think they were right. It is certainly the beginning of historiography and anthropology, and if we think, for instance, of the Copernican revolution, of self-conscious science. The trick is to benefit from an imaginative awareness of diversity, without falling into a kind of "anything goes" wishy-washy nihilism or scepticism. My book tries to steer a course to help us to do that, but the going is fairly rough at times!

Nigel: What are you working on at the moment?

Simon: I am trying to think further about representation and its connection with success in action, as part of an overall interest in giving a genuinely naturalistic theory of intentionality. That's the hard bit. For relaxation, I am writing an yet another introductory book, on how to read Hume.

Nigel: In the last twenty years or so Philosophy as an academic discipline has become much more professionalised, and to some extent philosophers in universities have been encouraged to become specialists in their fields. There has also been a great deal of pressure to publish articles in peer-reviewed journals. Is this a healthy situation? Is Philosophy thriving in UK universities?

Simon: I have my doubts about both these tendencies. The RAE is a complete farce [more of Simon's views on this here], and has indeed pressurized people to publish more and more about less and less, especially in peer-reviewed journals, whether or not they have anything worth saying. There is a lot of energy in UK universities, but I think there is no more creativity or genuine thinking-outside-the-envelope than there ever was. Originality is too risky: easier to turn the handle about some topic the journals find safe. I also think the RAE frenzy is hostile to large-scale academic endeavours. For example in the current review whole books are likely to count exactly the same as small-scale volleys in the journals. I think that's absurd, and translated into incentives will distort and corrupt the whole nature of UK philosophy. Fortunately we will still be able to look to the US and Australia for ideas.

Nigel: As well as writing bestselling philosophy books, you have been actively involved in the Humanist Philosophers Group...

Simon: Yes, if anything reassures me about the value of philosophy, it is seeing how debates about faith get conducted by people who are innocent of it.

Nigel: Lastly, what are the marks of a good philosopher?

Simon: Russell Moore famously singled out Wittgenstein from his lecture audience because he was the only one who looked puzzled. So that is probably a start. After that a certain bloody-mindedness or refusal to put anything to rest until it really is at rest. As so often, "it's dogged as does it". There is a certain scrupulous care about handling material, or refusal to stay content with mere rhetoric and metaphor.  But then there are less learnable virtues: God-given talents of imagination, of a nose for a problem, of having a capacious memory, and so on. You might include knowing where to stop. Finally there is luck: being in the right place at the right time with the right toolkit.

Nigel: Thank you.

© Simon Blackburn 2007

Wikipedia article on Simon Blackburn

Simon Blackburn's Web Pages

John Banville's review of Truth in The Guardian

Dowload an interview with Simon Blackburn (MP3)

Daniel Dennett: An Optimistic Philosopher

Philosophers are notoriously cautious and pessimistic. So it is a surprise to find Daniel Dennett, one of the greatest living philosophers, in optimistic frame of mind on the website Edge : there he confidently predicts the evapouration of the powerful mystique surrounding religion. Sadly, this is probably wishful thinking.

Humanism and Philosophy: an interview with Richard Norman

The leading humanist philosopher Richard Norman, author of On Humanism and a founder member of the Humanist Philosophers Group, kindly agreed to be interviewed for Virtual Philosopher. I’ve included some extracts from the interview below. You can download the complete interview Download richard_norman.rtf [16 KB rtf file].

Nigel:  What does Humanism mean?

Richard: I take it to be a view of the world which rejects religious beliefs - belief in a god or gods and belief in an after-life.  It asserts that this is the only life we have and that we are responsible for making the most of it.  And it maintains that we can find from our own resources, in human nature and human relationships, the means to live good lives – both in the sense of lives which are morally good and in the sense of lives which are fulfilling and meaningful.

Nigel:  Why do you reject the idea that God exists?

Richard: I believe that the onus is on those who believe in the existence of a god to provide reasons for that belief.  (This is a point which the philosopher Antony Flew has well made.)  I can’t prove that there is no god, but in the absence of good reasons for believing that a god exists, I live my life without belief in a god.  In particular, the success of scientific explanations of the natural world makes religious explanations redundant.  It’s in that sense that there is a tension between science and religion.  The two are not logically incompatible, but the more we succeed in discovering well-founded scientific explanations of the origins of the cosmos, the origins of living species, and so on, the more the explanations in terms of a divine creator become redundant.  They add nothing.

Nigel:  Why is there such an emphasis on being positive in humanism? It seems to me that much of the wishful thinking in religion is focussed on things turning out well and people being basically nice. Shouldn't those who recognise that there is no God also recognise humanity's darker side and the possibility that things may turn out very badly for us?

Richard: It’s important for humanists to acknowledge humanity’s darker side, and they have not always done so.  There was a tendency especially on the part of some earlier generations of secularists to suppose that it only needed the rejection of superstition and the triumph of reason to usher in the new millennium.  The horrors of twentieth-century history have made any such naïve optimism impossible to sustain.  But that’s not a reason for despair.  It makes no sense to maintain either that human beings are inherently corrupted, or that everything is guaranteed to turn out well (and Christianity seems to me to be an uneasy attempt to combine both those theses).  We can find innumerable examples in human experience of the terrible things that human beings are capable of, but also of the inspiring achievements of which they are capable – cultural and artistic achievements, struggles for social justice, and so on.  Humanism needs to be positive only in the sense of having a positive vision of what is possible.

Nigel: Do philosophers in particular have anything important to offer Humanism?

Richard: Humanism is philosophy.  I don’t like the view of academic philosophy as a self-contained technical discipline.  The central problems of philosophy, as discussed in the literature, all derive ultimately (though not always obviously) from ordinary people’s attempts to understand what the world is like, what kinds of things exist, what kinds of explanations count as good explanations of why things are as they are, and how we can decide how we ought to live.  It’s important for academic philosophy to be reminded of its roots.  So humanism actually has something important to offer philosophy.

© Richard Norman 2006