What Is It Like to Be a Philosopher?

In this interview, Adrian Moore, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oxford and Tutorial Fellow at St Hugh’s College, Oxford, talks about growing up lower middle class and Congregationalist, being interested in drawing, astronomy, and football, specifically Manchester City, The Little Grey Men, The Brothers Karamazov, Pink Floyd, Descartes, attending King’s College, lectures with Bernard Williams, discos and coffee, relationships, the appeal of Kant and Wittgenstein, time, mathematics, working with Strawson and Dummett in grad school at Balliol College, the Thatcher academic job market, being a Junior Dean, returning to King’s College, working on infinity, the process of producing a philosophy radio program for BBC, Hamlet, his writing routine, returning to St Hugh’s, Points of View, administrative work, the Oxford tutorial system, the evolution of metaphysics, specialization in philosophy, the future and nature of philosophy, co-editing MIND, Beethoven, The Sacred and Profane Love Machine, Love and Death, and his last meal…

[11/20/2020]

Where did you grow up?

I was born in Kettering in the East Midlands region of the UK. But my family moved north to Altrincham when I was seven, and that is where I lived until going to university. Altrincham is just south of the city of Manchester, and it’s now (although it wasn’t then) part of Greater Manchester, so I often describe myself as a Mancunian.

What was your family like?

Very supportive. I was one of two children: I have an older sister. I was the first member of my family to attend university, so none of the rest of my family could be described as ‘academic’. But they did have an interest in the world of academia, and they were extremely encouraging when it looked as though I was on a trajectory that would take me into that world. My mother was a voracious reader with a very extensive knowledge of history, politics, and literature. My father had more of a scientific bent: he always enjoyed logical and mathematical puzzles. I chatted endlessly with both my parents, and with my sister, about all sorts of issues that I later recognized as broadly philosophical in character. I suppose my family was paradigmatically lower middle class, although my mother’s upbringing had been very working class, and her politics, which had been greatly affected by that upbringing and which had a significant influence on me, were radically left-wing.

Religious household?

Very. We attended church at least once every Sunday, often twice. Our denomination was Congregationalism, or at least it was until the Congregationalists joined with the Presbyterians in the early 1970s to form what is now known as the United Reformed Church. This denomination is part of the non-conformist tradition that includes the Baptists and the Methodists. One of its hallmarks is that adherents are encouraged to be intellectually inquisitive and to take nothing for granted: everything is to be questioned; everything is ultimately open to challenge. I can remember countless Sunday lunches at which we all sat round the table and dissected the minister’s sermon from that morning! But there was a firm faith at the centre of it all, and this was accompanied by a powerful sense of right and wrong. This meant that I was subjected to two significant forces as a child: on the one hand I was brought up to be naturally skeptical; on the other hand I was brought up to believe in something both transcendent and of absolute importance. These two forces may seem to be in tension with each other. In fact I don’t think they are. But I have, in a way, made an entire career out of trying to understand what it takes to reconcile them.

Still religious?

Yes. I am actively involved in my local church. My religious life is still very much of a piece with the religious life in which I was brought up. I still attend a church that is part of the same denomination, the United Reformed Church: it is progressive, intellectually challenging, and politically active. It also makes a special effort to be inclusive, welcoming all those who have been marginalized or ostracized in one way or another, not least those who have been marginalized or ostracized by other branches of the church. Many who attend are LGBT.

As a little kid, what were you interested in?

Drawing. Astronomy. And football. (By football, of course, I mean what you would call soccer.) As a three- or four-year old I spent hours and hours drawing. I think this may have been due to the fact that I spent a lot of that time with a very deaf grandfather who, though he was extremely affectionate and loved children, didn’t respond well to my attempts to talk to him, which meant that drawing became one of my principal modes of expression. From the age of eight or nine I became fascinated, as nearly all children do, by the enormity of the universe. I was keen to learn as much as I could about its outer reaches: I still own the telescope that I was given when I was about ten. As for football, it was virtually impossible to grow up in the Manchester area in the late 1960s and not to have some interest in the game: this was a time when the two big Manchester clubs, Manchester City and Manchester United, were both extremely successful. Moreover, given the fierce rivalry between the two clubs, it was likewise difficult not to have some allegiance. A friend of mine was a City supporter. So I became one too, and I have been infatuated ever since. In recent years the two clubs have both been extremely successful again, City especially so, but for most of my life I supported a team that languished, not only in obscurity and mediocrity, but also in the shadow of its much more successful and much more famous neighbour.

Interested in any other sports?

Tennis is another sport that I enjoyed watching from an early age. But I have never had an iota of talent for playing sports. When individuals were being picked, one by one, for sports teams at school, I was nearly always either the last one to be picked or (what was even more humiliating in its undistinguished way—albeit I never felt particularly humiliated) the penultimate one to be picked.

As a teenager, did you get into any trouble?

No. I was by nature unadventurous and non-confrontational. I had quite a strong desire to stay out of trouble. I suppose that this answer, however disappointing it may be, at least achieves the remarkable feat of being at once very boring and very interesting.

Ha! Favorite subjects in high school?

I enjoyed English and mathematics. These were probably my two best subjects. But timetabling restrictions meant that I couldn’t combine them for my A Levels. I could, however, combine modern languages with mathematics, and that is what I did: my three A Level subjects were French, Russian, and mathematics. Despite my childhood passion for astronomy, I was never particularly good at science subjects.

Books?

I wasn’t an avid reader, though I did enjoy reading. One of my early favourites was The Little Grey Men by B.B. I also enjoyed Richmal Crompton’s William books. At high school I became a great William Golding fan. And when I was studying Russian at A Level, I was exposed for the first time to Russian literature, something for which I shall always be grateful. To this day Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov remains, as it was when I first encountered it as an A Level student, my favourite novel.

It’s fantastic. Why did you find it so gripping?

Oh, gosh. Where to begin? There is so much going on in that novel. In particular—and this is something that I appreciate now but didn’t really appreciate at the time—there is so much of philosophical importance going on in that novel. I sometimes include sections from the novel in my reading lists for undergraduates. For instance, when my undergraduates are studying the problem of evil, as part of their philosophy of religion course, I recommend that they read the section in the novel entitled ‘The Grand Inquisitor’. This is a story within a story. It’s told by one brother, Ivan, to another, Alyosha, and it’s designed to question Alyosha’s belief in a benevolent God.

It’s amazing! Were you into music?

It took me a while to become a real lover of classical music, though I was always surrounded by classical music and there was always classical music that I enjoyed listening to—‘listening to’ being the operative phrase, since I never properly learned to play an instrument despite the enjoyment that I derived from dabbling on a piano that we owned. I do now count myself as a lover of classical music: my favourite composer, by a considerable distance, is Beethoven. As a teenager I also enjoyed a lot of popular music. I owned most of Pink Floyd’s albums. And there were always (of course) The Beatles.

Did you start thinking about what you wanted to do in college, if college was even on the table?

Yes. I have already mentioned that I studied French A Level. One of our set texts was Voltaire’s Lettres Philosophiques. That already whetted my appetite to engage in further study of philosophy. But that was not my primary inspiration. My primary inspiration was a eureka moment that I still clearly recall having when I was reading something by Descartes that we were asked to look at as background reading. I can’t now remember whether it was his Meditations or his Discourse, but I do remember being totally transfixed by Descartes’ willingness to doubt everything and by his insistence that he couldn’t doubt his own existence. As I have already indicated, I had always been encouraged to question everything—but not with such penetration, and not in such a fundamental way. I knew straight away that this was something that I wanted to pursue at university. Another very important source of inspiration for me was my mathematics teacher, who had himself studied philosophy at university and who ran some extracurricular classes in which he introduced us to the philosophy of mathematics, to some rudiments of logic, and to some of the basic principles of transfinite arithmetic, all of which I loved.

Where did you apply to college?

I applied to study philosophy at King’s College Cambridge. I was very fortunate to be accepted. This was a great time to be studying philosophy at Cambridge. The two professors were Elizabeth Anscombe and Bernard Williams: I attended lectures by both of them. I also attended lectures by Casimir Lewy and Hugh Mellor. And I had one-to-one supervisions with Ross Harrison, Chris Hookway, Jennifer Hornsby, Nick Jardine, Jonathan Lear, Tim Smiley, and Michael Tanner. Every one of these people did a huge amount to inspire me. I suppose Bernard Williams’ lectures were especially gripping.

What was the plan?

There was no plan. I certainly didn’t expect to become an academic. I was just keen to pursue philosophy for its own sake, and then to take it from there. My vague memory is that, when I started at university, I viewed both teaching and social work as possibilities.

What did your parents make of your decision to go into philosophy?

They were extremely supportive. They were delighted that I had been academically successful, but I think they were just as delighted that I had found something that I could pursue which meant so much to me. Neither of them had had any formal contact with philosophy—although my mother did attend classes in philosophy run by the Workers’ Educational Association while she was pregnant with me!—but they were both always very keen to hear about my studies. They often took the attitude, wrongly in my view, that most of it was utterly beyond them, but this didn’t stop them from being keen to grasp as much as they could.

What was your first philosophy class like?

The mainstay of the Cambridge teaching system was then, as it still is, what is called the supervision. A supervision is a weekly meeting between a tutor and one, two, or three undergraduates, in which there is discussion of a topic based on an essay written by the undergraduate or by one of the undergraduates. The tutor for my first ever supervision was Ross Harrison, and I was one of two undergraduates in attendance. The topic was Descartes’ method of doubt, the very topic which, as I’ve already said, provided the eureka moment that first got me hooked onto philosophy. The University also laid on lectures. These were non-compulsory, but very helpful. The first of these that I attended was by Jimmy Altham, and it was on the objectivity of moral thinking. The third component of my early philosophical education took the form of logic classes. These were attended by just five undergraduates if my memory serves me correctly, and they were run by Chris Hookway. I was enthralled by it all.

What were classes with Bernard Williams like?

As an undergraduate I had no opportunity to be supervised by Bernard: he only supervised graduate students. But I did attend his lectures, as I have already mentioned. And I found them riveting. He lectured without notes, and he was just the virtuoso that you might expect. Each lecture was a dazzling display—erudite, witty, very funny, and totally absorbing. The other main contact that I had with him was through weekly ‘at homes’ that he held: he was in his college rooms at a certain time each week, and anyone could turn up. Once the group had assembled, there would be a two-hour impromptu discussion of some philosophical question that someone proposed on the spot. These events were mostly attended by graduate students, although there were always a few keen undergraduates in attendance (such as me!), and occasionally other members of the Faculty too. The group typically comprised about twenty-five people, and the discussions were always superb. Bernard himself steered them, of course, and he always had plenty of brilliant and insightful points to make. But they were discussions, not lectures: there was plenty of scope for other people to contribute as well.

I remember one hilarious incident. I think it was in my second year. The grandmother of an undergraduate friend of mine was visiting Cambridge with her ‘boyfriend’, and my friend asked me if I would take this elderly couple along to one of Bernard’s ‘at homes’. I wasn’t sure that they were entitled to attend, but I meekly agreed, and I sat with them at the back of the room, embarrassed by the fact that everyone could see that they were with me. My embarrassment was compounded when Bernard began by doing what he always began by doing, namely asking, ‘What shall we discuss this week?’, and—quick as a flash—the boyfriend asked, slightly aggressively, ‘What is philosophy?’ In fact there ensued one of our best ever discussions, a very wide-ranging exploration of the nature of philosophy, its aims, its methods, its relation to its own history, and so on. And, to my relief, neither my friend’s grandmother nor her boyfriend said a further word. When we emerged, I turned to them and asked, ‘What did you think of that?’ The boyfriend said he was disappointed. I asked, ‘Why?’ He said, ‘I asked what philosophy is, and no-one seemed to know.’ I tried to explain that the point wasn’t really to arrive at a definitive answer, but to explore the issues and to reflect on what was relevant to the question. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I see. That explains it. I couldn’t believe that this guy was a world-famous professional philosopher and still didn’t know what it was that he was paid to do.’

Yes! Anscombe has always struck me as intimidating? What was she like?

Intimidating! I think even Bernard found her intimidating. This had something to do with the fact that she oozed utter self-confidence both in the correctness of her own views and in their importance. I had very little to do with her as an undergraduate, although I did attend some of her (badly delivered, badly organized, but still strangely engrossing) lectures. The one time that I felt the real force of her capacity to intimidate was when I was later back at Cambridge, in a post-doctoral position, and I encountered her at a cocktail party. This gives me an excuse to regale you with another anecdote.

I was chatting to a group of graduate students. Anscombe came up to us, and asked me what I was working on. My heart sank. I remember thinking ‘I don’t want to go there.’ But I found myself mumbling, ‘Some of Wittgenstein’s ideas.’ I hoped that she would then turn her attention to someone else. But one of the graduate students in the group mischievously interjected at that point and said, ‘Aren’t you arguing that Wittgenstein was a kind of transcendental idealist, Adrian?’ In fact I wasn’t—not exactly—but I still didn’t want to go there, so I mumbled some sort of assent. ‘How interesting,’ Anscombe said, and then added—after a pregnant pause and before turning to someone else—‘I once knew someone called Wittgenstein.’

Amazing. What did you do for fun in college?

This and that. I suppose that what I remember with greatest fondness, and what was in many ways greatest fun, was simply chatting into the small hours with friends about politics, religion, the arts, the sciences, and life in general. One of the advantages of the Cambridge collegiate system is that an undergraduate’s friends are bound to come from a range of disciplines, which fosters this sort of thing: the conversations that I remember most clearly were not with other philosophy undergraduates. My passion for football also continued to keep me entertained throughout my time as an undergraduate. It was during this time that Manchester City won their last major honour before a very long period (thirty-four years to be precise) of dire underachievement.

Were you friends with the other undergraduates?

Yes, I made some extremely close friends. And they have remained friends ever since. But actually, the fact that I have maintained friendships from that time doesn’t specially mark it out. The truth is that I have maintained friendships from every phase of my life, extending right back to my time at primary school, indeed extending right back to my pre-school years. I threw big birthday parties when I turned fifty and when I turned sixty, and on both occasions there were friends there from these very early phases of my life. I hate losing touch with people. I am also extraordinarily lucky in that I have never found it particularly difficult to establish close friendships.

Did you party?

No. Despite the reference to my two big birthday parties, both of which were incredibly enjoyable occasions—I was never a great party-goer. I am virtually tee-total, and I can’t abide dancing (at least insofar as I have any sense of what it would be like to dance). To quote my now sadly departed Uncle John, ‘If there are two things I can’t stand, they’re both discos.’ I would always much prefer to be in some room with a small group of friends chatting over a quiet coffee than at a party.

Any room for romance?                  

No. It seems a bit stark just to say that, but still—that is the answer. In fact I have never been romantically involved, not in any really serious way. I would be happy to proceed to the next question, but doubtless you’d like me to say more. Well, I suppose I can scotch one possible explanation, an explanation that I know occurred to some of my undergraduate friends, namely that I’m gay. It was much less common back then than it is now for people to be openly gay, or even to acknowledge to themselves that they were gay, which meant that, if someone was not romantically involved, it was often taken (correctly) to be a symptom of this. But I’m not gay. I am sexually attracted to women, and I love the company of women. (I’m not sure if the word ‘philogynist’ is strictly part of the lexicon, but it should be, and, if it were, it would definitely apply to me.) Of course, another possible explanation for why I’ve never been romantically involved, and one that I am less well qualified to scotch, is that, although I’m attracted to women, they have never been attracted to me. I think I can say, without undue self-deception, that that’s not the case. But in a way it’s irrelevant, since not being romantically involved with anyone has really been my own choice, however non-deliberate and however non-self-conscious a choice it may have been. It has certainly never bothered me. I have already indicated my good fortune in having extremely close friends (these include extremely close female friends) but the fact is that I’m a bit of a loner. And no doubt this in turn is connected to the further fact that—if you’ll pardon the cliché—I have always been wedded to my academic work.

Were you politically active?

Not very. I was a member of the Labour party, and I followed politics with interest, but I didn’t have much active engagement with it. I had none at all with student politics.

Overall, how did your interests and worldview evolve, philosophically?

I was very much a product of my early education. Cambridge was steeped in the analytic tradition, and there was significant animosity towards other traditions. There was even some animosity towards the history of philosophy, despite the fact that Anscombe and Williams were the two professors. I was caught up in all of this. I thought, as many analytic philosophers do, that philosophy at its best is a kind of highly general science whose most impressive achievements lie in its more formal and technical branches. My favourite philosopher was W.V. Quine. In my final year as an undergraduate I specialized in metaphysics, philosophical logic, mathematical logic, and the philosophy of mathematics. Forty years on, though I still greatly value all that I learned and all that I was exposed to as an undergraduate, I see things very differently. And in fact, even at the time, I had some sense, not only that there were more things in heaven and earth than were dreamt of in my philosophy, but that there were more things in philosophy than were dreamt of in my philosophy. Towards the end of my time as an undergraduate I was just beginning to come under the influence of Wittgenstein. And I was in no doubt that I needed to know a lot more about Kant. Kant and Wittgenstein are the two philosophers who have subsequently become the two most important philosophical influences on me.

You say Wittgenstein was an influence. Early or late?

When I first encountered Wittgenstein’s ideas, it was ideas from his later philosophy: I was pretty quickly under their sway. But as I began to find out more about Wittgenstein, I became intrigued by his earlier work too. I became particularly interested in the question of how much is retained in the transition from the earlier work to the later work. I said in response to your earlier question that Kant and Wittgenstein are the two philosophers who have become the two most important philosophical influences on me, and another question that has intrigued me, ever since I came across Bernard Williams’ wonderful article ‘Wittgenstein and Idealism’ in the late 1970s or early 1980s, is how much of Wittgenstein—both early and late—can profitably be viewed through the lens of a kind of Kantianism. (Hence the incident with Anscombe at the cocktail party that I told you about earlier.)

What do you make of the critics?

Well, I can understand where they’re coming from. Wittgenstein’s philosophy—especially his later philosophy—is not just unorthodox, it’s iconoclastic. It is an assault on some of the deepest preconceptions that philosophers have had about what they are even doing. I have no difficulty in seeing why its ‘victims’, if I may put it that way, should think that almost all his philosophical views are wrong, nor in seeing how his work can both infuriate and exasperate those who are fundamentally unsympathetic to it. Such work is bound to attract fierce criticism. For me, however, the fierceness of the criticism merely serves to enhance the interest of the work. This interest is compounded by the fact that a very common reaction among those encountering Wittgenstein’s later work for the first time is, ‘Why is this worth saying? Isn’t it all just obvious?’ There seems to me to be something very significant in the fact that the same body of work can elicit such diverse reactions. There is one reaction, incidentally, that makes me feel uneasy. I have in mind the reaction of certain die-hards who think that whatever Wittgenstein says must be right. This reaction makes me feel uneasy, not only because I dislike it, but also because I’m acutely conscious of how hard it can be to resist: there is a seductive power in Wittgenstein’s writings which can make it harder and harder, as one becomes more and more sensitive to what he’s doing, to entertain the suspicion that he’s doing it anything less than perfectly.

What drew you to Kant?

My reaction to Kant is rather different from my reaction to Wittgenstein. In the case of Wittgenstein, I can readily understand why some philosophers find so much of his work unworthy of serious study—even though, in my view, they’re completely wrong to do so. In the case of Kant, by contrast, I am mystified when philosophers dismiss his work. Not many do. But some do. And I simply don’t understand. You ask what drew me to Kant. The question, for me, is how any philosopher can fail be drawn to Kant. Yes, I can see how a non-philosopher who has no taste for the subject will struggle to make much of it. And yes, I acknowledge that there is a great deal in his work that no philosopher nowadays can take seriously. But the depth of his work, the range of his work, and (what is especially noteworthy given both of these) the unity of his work mark it as something quite unique in the history of philosophy. My own view is that Kant is the greatest philosopher of all time. I can see how a case could be made for either Plato or Aristotle instead. But I find it hard to see how a case could be made for anyone else. And I’m at a loss when Kant is thought not even to be in contention for the title.

Do you feel as though studying people like Wittgenstein and Kant has an effect on the way you view the world?

This question reminds me of something that a graduate friend of mine used to say: Kantian exegesis is a way of life! That may be an exaggeration, but, even if it is, it seems clear to me that you cannot be a professional philosopher as intent on trying to understand another philosopher as I have been on trying to understand Wittgenstein and Kant without this having an effect on how you view the world. So yes, I do think that studying these two philosophers has an effect on how I view the world. What effect it has, I find much harder to tell. Indeed I wonder if it’s even possible to tell. This is not just because it involves reckoning with such a gross counterfactual: how I would have viewed the world otherwise. There is also the problem that telling what effect it has may require enough critical distance from Kant and Wittgenstein to be able to get the measure of their influence on me, but also enough immersion in Kant and Wittgenstein to be able to make sense of the influence—a balance that perhaps can’t be struck. I’m sorry: that’s a typical philosopher’s answer!

When exactly did you decide to do postgraduate work in philosophy?

Late in my second year, I think. I still hadn’t settled on pursuing a career in academia, but I loved what I was doing so much, and I thought that what I was doing was sufficiently worthwhile, that I was determined to do some more.

Who helped you through the process of applying to do postgraduate work?

I received most help from my principal tutor at King’s, Ross Harrison. I remember that he, Jonathan Lear, and Timothy Smiley acted as my referees.

What were your writing samples on?

McTaggart’s argument for the unreality of time, and the existence of mathematical objects.

Where did you end up?

I was very fortunate (just as I had been at undergraduate level). I was admitted to the B.Phil. course in Oxford, which—as I’m sure you know—is in spite of its name a Masters course, indeed arguably the best known philosophy Masters course in the world. And Oxford was an extraordinary place to study philosophy, as it still is. This is partly because of the sheer size of the Philosophy Faculty, which, even if it weren’t for the calibre of its staff, would guarantee copious amounts of philosophical activity. My good fortune was compounded by the fact that I was able to work with the two people that I had principally hoped to work with, Peter Strawson and Michael Dummett. My college was Balliol College, which has always fostered philosophy and has produced some great philosophers—including Bernard Williams, who had already had such an influence on me in Cambridge. The Master (or head) of Balliol at the time was Anthony Kenny. Alan Montefiore was also teaching at Balliol then: I had almost no contact with him while I was studying there, but I did attend some of his lectures and we subsequently interacted a lot and became friends. This was one of the factors in helping me to appreciate the value of non-analytic traditions in philosophy, Alan’s own interests lying largely in what is still called (unhelpfully) ‘continental’ philosophy.

What was working with Strawson like?

Great! I worked with him on the philosophy of language and on Kant: in both cases he gave me sympathetic penetrating feedback from which I learned a huge amount. Strawson was always meticulous and measured in his approach to everything. I seem to remember that our supervisions always finished exactly on the hour, but without ever giving the impression that they had been brutally cut short. If there were significant loose ends, this was only because there are always significant loose ends after any philosophical exchange!

In general, was graduate life what you expected?

Largely, yes. This may be a reflection of the fact that I’d been an undergraduate at Cambridge: the life of a graduate or an undergraduate at Oxford or Cambridge is probably more similar to the life of either at the other than it is to the life of most students at most other universities. There were differences, of course. But to this day I remain uncertain whether the most important of these were differences between graduate life and undergraduate life, or differences between Oxford and Cambridge, or possibly even differences between Balliol and King’s. Be that as it may, nothing about being a graduate student took me completely by surprise.

Was it a competitive environment?

I don’t recall it as competitive. But when I look at graduate students in Oxford nowadays, and see how competitive their environment is, I find it hard to believe that things have changed that much. This in turn leaves me uncomfortably aware that one plausible explanation for why I don’t recall it as competitive is that I was desensitized by the fact that I myself was one of the culprits! I hope this isn’t the case, but I’m not confident that it’s not.

Favorite classes or lectures?

I particularly enjoyed Dummett’s lectures, in which he tried out ideas that subsequently found their way into some of his best known publications. I especially remember lectures on material that later appeared in his 1991 book The Logical Basis of Metaphysics. Dummett was an extraordinary lecturer. For one thing, he never lectured twice on exactly the same material. He always preferred to maintain as much freshness as possible in his delivery. It was impossible to hear him lecture and not to have a sense of thought in action. He would pace up and down, cigarette in hand, pausing periodically to formulate in his own mind how best to proceed, referring only occasionally, if at all, to his notes. The upshot would always be a beautifully structured and marvellously conceived argument in which ideas about the most difficult and abstract of topics were seamlessly woven together.

At the time, at Oxford, what was trending philosophically?

The dominant figure in philosophy in Oxford at that time was undoubtedly Donald Davidson (even though he had never himself spent a great deal of time in Oxford). People were obsessed with his views, and with seeing how they could be applied to as large a range of philosophical issues as possible. Many of the people who peddled these views—people like John McDowell, for example—would surely have had far less enthusiasm for them if they’d been working in a different environment. Among Davidson’s views, it was perhaps those in the philosophy of language that were especially influential. This reflects something else that I recall from that time: how central to philosophy the philosophy of language was taken to be. Dummett used to argue that precisely what constituted the trademark of analytic philosophy—the sort of philosophy in which most of us were engaged—was its fundamental tenet that the philosophy of language is the foundation of all other philosophy. In those days, if you were studying the B.Phil., you needed to specialize in three subjects; and people used to joke that, when one B.Phil. student asked another B.Phil. student which subjects they were specializing in, the question was always, ‘Which two subjects are you specializing in?’, since it was simply taken for granted that the third would be the philosophy of language. That wasn’t far from the truth.

How did you decide on a thesis topic?

This is related to my answer to the previous question. I was as immersed in the philosophy of language as anyone else, so it was very natural for me to choose a topic in that area. My favourite philosopher had been Quine. By now I was less sympathetic to Quine’s views, but I was still enthralled by them. So I chose to write about some of Quine’s doctrines in the philosophy of language. In my final year as an undergraduate I’d heard Quine deliver a remarkable lecture in which he argued, in a series of seemingly incontrovertible steps from seemingly incontrovertible premises, that not only is there good reason to acknowledge the existence of mathematical objects—contrary to some of his own earlier scruples—but there is good reason to acknowledge the existence of nothing but mathematical objects. This had seemed to me at the time of the lecture, and still seemed to me as a graduate student, to constitute a reductio ad absurdum of one or more of the doctrines that had led him there, and I wanted to use my thesis as a way of discovering where the problem lay. Unsurprisingly, given other remarks that I have made about how my views were developing at the time, I came to the conclusion that the problem lay in a kind of philosophical sickness that awaited Wittgensteinian therapy (though I didn’t put it that way, and I now think that what awaited Wittgensteinian therapy were rather my own efforts to rectify the problem!). Incidentally, the word ‘thesis’ is ambiguous in this context. As part of my B.Phil. course, I had to write a 30,000 word thesis. But I also went on to write a 75,000 word doctoral thesis. However, everything that I’ve just said applies to both, since I did what most people did: I used the doctoral thesis as a way of consolidating and developing what I had written in the B.Phil. thesis.

Who did you work with on your theses?

Michael Dummett. I am even more conscious now than I was at the time—though I was certainly conscious of it then—what good fortune this was. I have already commented that the two people with whom I principally hoped to work as a graduate were Strawson and Dummett. And I remember, when I was applying to study for the B.Phil., telling people this, and being warned that they were both in high demand and that I should prepare to be disappointed. So I don’t take lightly the fact that I managed to work with both of them. Dummett, like Strawson, was a great supervisor. But he was much more disorganized than Strawson. I often turned up to appointments only to find that he was not there, or had double-booked. I also needed to ensure that I had physical copies of any work that I submitted to him (this was in the days before electronic versions) since there was a good chance that anything submitted to him would later be lost. But once I was in the room with him, and once both my work and I had his attention, he was a remarkably generous teacher. He was always keen to understand what I was trying to say and always ready with helpful suggestions about how to clarify it and develop it.

How did you develop as a philosopher? Who influenced you?

 I was very much under the influence of Dummett himself. This was more through attending his lectures and reading his work than through being supervised by him. When he was supervising students he was primarily interested in discussing their views, not conveying his own. I also continued to be influenced by Wittgenstein. How far these influences operated in tandem and how far they militated against each other is actually a delicate philosophical-cum-exegetical question. Dummett’s own thinking was very Wittgensteinian in many ways, very un-Wittgensteinian in many others. Gordon Baker and Peter Hacker ran classes on Wittgenstein at the time. These classes fostered a great deal of discipleship—at least of Wittgenstein-as-interpreted-by-Baker-and-Hacker. But, for reasons that I no longer clearly recall, I didn’t attend any of their classes (I probably just felt under time pressure and prioritized other things). So they were never instrumental in my own Wittgensteinianism. However, when I later became acquainted with Baker and Hacker’s written work on Wittgenstein, I derived a lot from that too. And I was always fascinated by Bernard Williams’ work, especially his idea of an ‘absolute conception of reality’, which he first articulated in his book on Descartes—published at the end of my time as an undergraduate—and which he developed in Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy—published a few years after I finished my doctorate.

I should also mention Phil Turetzky. He was a close friend whom I’d met in Cambridge while he was working on his doctorate. We have maintained our close friendship ever since, though we have lived in different continents since he finished his thesis (at which point he returned to his native USA). His influence on me has been inestimable. He was always insistent on the importance to philosophy of its own history, and he was always open to what different philosophical traditions have to offer, which—as you can appreciate from what I’ve said about Cambridge philosophy at the time—meant that he counted for me as something of an iconoclast. It wasn’t until I became a graduate student that I really began to see the force of his ideas. These ideas have significantly shaped much of my subsequent work.

High Points? Low points?

The high points were all connected with the growing realization that I enjoyed what I was doing so much that I’d like to pursue it as a career. The low points were all connected with the growing realization that this would not be easy and might not even be possible.

What did you do to unwind?

Much the same as when I was an undergraduate.

Chance to teach?

Yes. As a doctoral student I conducted one-to-one tutorials (‘tutorials’ is the Oxford name for what were called supervisions in Cambridge). These were with an undergraduate at my own college, Balliol, on the philosophy of language. It’s amusing to reflect back on these tutorials now, because I made the classic mistake that most graduate students make when they teach for the first time: I set absurdly high standards. I can clearly remember thinking, ‘Hmm, this student is quite good.’ I realize in retrospect, some forty years later, that this student was not ‘quite good’; he was outstanding!

What was the job market like when you finished?

Bad. This was in the early 1980s, when the Thatcher government introduced savage cuts to the funding of higher education. Philosophy was particularly vulnerable, since the economically obsessed politicians of the day couldn’t see what the point of it was. There were entire philosophy departments that were closed down. Other departments suffered too: many posts were lost. This meant that the market was very competitive. In the period between finishing my doctorate and finally obtaining a permanent post, I applied for nearly every philosophy post in the UK for which I was remotely eligible. Had the situation persisted, I would have started applying for philosophy posts overseas too; but I had a strong preference to stay in the UK. And, although there weren’t many posts for me to apply for, there were enough—so it felt—for me to be able to paper my walls with rejection letters!

Nice. Where did you land your first gig?

I survived for a year after completing my doctorate by co-running logic classes for first-year undergraduates with a colleague who was in a similar position, and by conducting some further tutorials. I was then appointed to a one-year teaching post at University College (always known in Oxford as ‘Univ’). This post was called a ‘lecturership’, which not only demonstrates idiosyncratic Oxford spelling—there’s an extra ‘r’ before the ‘s’—it also demonstrates idiosyncratic Oxford terminology. It really was a misnomer. My main duties didn’t involve any lecturing. In fact they were pretty much as they had been, to run logic classes for first-year undergraduates and to conduct tutorials; but my students were now all at Univ. This lecturership was renewed twice, which meant that I was at Univ for three years altogether. In the third of these years my official title was ‘Radcliffe Lecturer’, since the funding came from the Radcliffe Trust. This in turn was to support John McDowell, who had been appointed to a Radcliffe Fellowship: I took on McDowell’s teaching duties, leaving him free to carry out research.

Were you where you wanted to be?

Yes, it was wonderful to be able to stay on in Oxford—and especially so at Univ. This meant that for three years my two immediate colleagues were the two Fellows in Philosophy at Univ, McDowell himself—who continued to be a presence in the college even during that third year, when he had leave of absence—and David Wiggins—who had been one of my doctoral examiners. (The other, incidentally, had been his then wife Jennifer Hornsby.) I had already long been a big fan of both of them. Working alongside them did not disappoint. I remember in particular running some very enjoyable revision classes in metaphysics and epistemology for third-year undergraduates with McDowell. Hovering over all of this, however, was the uncertainty concerning what would come next.

What is a Junior Dean? You were Junior Dean at Oxford…

This is another example of peculiar Oxford terminology. In an Oxford college—or rather, in most Oxford colleges (there are sub-dialects of the Oxford dialect!)—the ‘Dean’ is a relatively senior tutor with special responsibility for non-academic disciplinary matters, such as severely anti-social behaviour and damage to property. The Dean has a team of ‘Assistant Deans’ or ‘Junior Deans’. These are often graduate students. But they’re also sometimes more junior academics. I was in the latter category: I played the role of Junior Dean for two of the three years that I held my lecturership at Univ. I had various duties. For instance, any student wishing to hold a party first needed my permission. On alternate weekends, I was ‘on call’ to assist the porters in handling any major incident, to ensure that parties that I had authorized finished on time, to ensure that parties that I had not authorized didn’t take place at all, and suchlike. I was never myself involved in meting out any punishment. If I became aware of a violation of a rule, I simply reported it to the Dean, in whose hands the matter then lay. I hated it. I was continually on tenterhooks. Admittedly, nothing really awful happened. The worst incident occurred one Saturday evening when I was called upon to help deal with some rowdy football fans who had decided, on their way home from a heavy defeat at an Oxford United game, to gatecrash a Gilbert and Sullivan Society party in the college. I remember being thrown across the floor and landing very awkwardly. I also remember being called, for the one and only time in my entire life, ‘four-eyes’. (I wear specs.) That was as bad as it got; and, as I say, it wasn’t that bad. But the constant fear of some impending calamity did get me down. I remember a few years ago reliving this period of my life with a friend and commenting that these were the two worst years of my life. I then added that of course I was only joking—meaning to emphasize the point that I have just made, that it wasn’t that bad—whereupon my friend replied, ‘Really?’ And for the first time it struck me that, if I were asked to pick out what were, really, the two worst years of my life, then actually this period would be a very serious contender. And this in turn reminds me of how fortunate I’ve been, since apart from my decanal duties (and the uncertainty concerning my academic future) there was, as I’ve already indicated, much during this period that was fantastic and that I had to be grateful for. Oh, and I should add that my reward for acting as Junior Dean was free accommodation in the college, which was a colossal bonus, since at this stage in my life I had hardly any money.

I think a lot of people would find it surprising that the job market was really that bad for people from Oxford.

Some people have an exaggerated conception of the weight that a degree from Oxford has on the job market. The job market was bad even for people from Oxford.

Where did you end up after Oxford?

I was awarded a ‘JRF’—a Junior Research Fellowship—back at my old college in Cambridge, King’s. This was a four-year post-doctoral appointment (although I completed only three of the four years, since my current post began in the fourth). It gave me the security to consolidate my research while I was applying for permanent posts. There was also an opportunity, but no obligation, to do some teaching and to gain experience of various administrative roles, including serving on committees. I loved it. This may have been the happiest period of my life. I loved being back at Cambridge; I loved having the chance to focus on my research without all the anxieties of an uncertain immediate future; I loved the philosophical stimulation provided by my colleagues, including people whom I had revered as an undergraduate, such as Ross Harrison and Bernard Williams. But I especially loved the companionship of Naomi Eilan, of whom I must make special mention.

She, like me, had been a graduate student at Oxford and was awarded a JRF at King’s at the same time. The college had advertised that it would be awarding ‘one or two’ JRFs, specifically in philosophy. We had each discovered that we were both applicants when we found ourselves sitting next to each other on the bus from Oxford to Cambridge to attend for our interviews! We naturally took ourselves to be in competition with each other: it didn’t cross our minds, despite the wording of the advertisement, that we might both be successful.

For three years Naomi and I were close colleagues. We co-ran a graduate seminar, collaborated in various other ways, and discussed our ideas together constantly. We also became life-long friends. I couldn’t have wished for a better companion. I find it impossible to imagine how my philosophical work would have developed without—if you’ll pardon me a quotation from the preface to one of my books—‘her continual encouragement, enthusiasm, and penetrating advice’.

You’re a literary executor of Bernard Williams, right?

Yes. I was invited by Bernard to act as one of his literary executors, along with his wife Patricia. Bernard approached me about this when he’d already been diagnosed with cancer and he knew that his time was limited. It was a huge honour to be asked to take on this important role.

I imagine you were close?

We were certainly philosophically close. This was due not least, of course, to his influence on me. And I always got on well with him. Even so, it would be a bit misleading to describe us as ‘close’, in personal terms, not because there were any barriers between us, but simply because his own very busy life and the fact that he never actually taught me meant that we never spent much time together, certainly not one-to-one. I think part of the reason why he chose me as one of his literary executors was that he was confident that Patricia and I would find each other congenial and work well together. And indeed, although I didn’t know her very well before we began to deal with Bernard’s literary estate, she is now a dear friend.

Surprises at King’s?

Hardly. I was going ‘home’. This was my old college. True, I was seeing it from a new vantage point; but that probably made less of a difference at King’s than it would have done at most other academics institutions, since students and staff were always well integrated there.

Were you trying to publish journal articles at this point?

I was primarily engaged in trying to publish a book. I was appointed to the JRF on the strength of a research proposal that I hoped would form the basis of a book and that did in fact form the basis of what would eventually be my second book Points of View. But I had already written some journal articles that were relevant to this project, including an article with the same title, ‘Points of View’, which acted as a kind of compendium of the book and which, if I remember correctly, had just been accepted for publication when I started on the JRF. And I did what many people working on academic books do: I wrote articles to try out some of the main ideas in the book, articles that I published independently. I spent much of the first year of my JRF working on these. Most of the material in them later found its way into the book itself, albeit considerably modified.

What’s the thesis of Points of View?

Well, it begins with the question whether it is possible to think about the world with complete detachment, or ‘from no point of view’. I argue that it is. This is basically an elaboration of a famous argument due to Bernard Williams. But I’m also interested in the many powerful considerations in favour of the opposite answer, that such a thing is not possible. And I argue that the most compelling of these considerations depend on a kind of idealism that can be extracted from the work of Kant and Wittgenstein. The problem is that the idealism in question is incoherent. So that makes the question of the appeal of these considerations all the more urgent. My diagnosis, which I suppose could in a way be described as the ‘main thesis’ of the book, is that such idealism is the nonsense that results from attempting to express inexpressible knowledge that we have. I then try to apply this idea to a range of philosophical issues, including the nature of persons, the nature of mathematics, the nature of value, and the existence of God.

So, how exactly did you get into the monograph business? How does it work?

Well, as I have indicated, my first book wasn’t Points of View. What happened was that, during my JRF at King’s, I was approached by Ted Honderich—who had been on the selection committee for one of my earlier unsuccessful job applications—in his capacity as General Editor of a Routledge series entitled The Problems of Philosophy: Their Past and Present. Each book in this series had a bipartite format, with the first part giving the history of some philosophical problem and the second part giving the author’s own understanding of the problem. Ted wondered if I was interested in writing a book for this series. At that stage not many books in the series had been published, or even commissioned; so he had a very long list of suggestions for possible future contributions to the series. None of them particularly appealed to me, however. But the idea of writing a book for the series did. And there was one topic not on his list, namely the infinite, that immediately struck me as both an ideal topic for the series, given its fascinating history, and an ideal topic for me to work on, given how well it connected with so many of my philosophical interests. So I wrote back to see whether that would be possible. He said yes. Routledge in turn approved a more detailed outline of what I planned to do, and I signed a contract with them.

Although I had already begun working on Points of View at that stage, this new project soon took precedence. This was not least because I had given Routledge a submission date, whereas I was not under contract with any publisher to write Points of View. (King’s, incidentally, had always made it clear that it wouldn’t be a problem if I digressed from my original research project.) So there you have it: I ‘got into the monograph business’ by being commissioned to write my first book, The Infinite.

How did you get into infinity? Also, what is infinity?

This puts me in mind of something that I have always thought about philosophers, namely that they are people who have never really grown up. What child hasn’t been intrigued by the idea of infinity, in some guise or other? Children naturally wonder whether space goes on forever, for example, and, if it doesn’t, whether that means that there’s something ‘outside’ space, and, if there is, whether that goes on forever. And lots of children are exercised by the question of whether there is a biggest number.

Actually, that calls to mind my own earliest memory of reckoning with infinity. I have no idea quite how accurate this memory is, but anyway, for what it’s worth, I recall walking home from primary school with some friends while some of them were seeing who could think of the biggest number. One by one they tried to outdo each other. I suppose what they were doing, in effect, was comparing their knowledge of the names of numbers, and seeing who knew the name of the biggest. One said, ‘A million.’ Another said, ‘A billion.’ Another outdid them both and said, ‘A trillion.’ Then someone introduced a game-changer. He said, ‘A trillion and one.’ Straightway it was obvious that this contest might never have a winner! And so it proceeded: ‘A trillion and two,’ ‘Two trillion,’ ‘Two trillion and one.’ Then someone said, ‘Infinity.’ I think we’d all heard the term before, but weren’t quite sure what it meant, although it seemed perfect for this context. It seemed to be the ultimate game-changer, a move that precluded any further moves, a kind of checkmate. I found this idea riveting. I now have a somewhat different understanding of things, needless to say, but basically I’m still riveted.

You also asked what infinity is. Well, that’s the main question that I try to address in my book. But be fair. If I were a crime writer, you wouldn’t expect me to reveal to you in an interview who the murderer in one on my books is. If you want to find out what infinity is, or at any rate what I think infinity is, then I suggest that you read the book! But it’s probably O.K. for me say, without a spoiler alert, that I don’t really think infinity is any one thing.

You did a radio program on the infinite, right?

Yes. Much later, when I was back at Oxford, I wrote and presented a radio series on the history of thought about the infinite for the BBC. The story behind this was that a production company approached the University inviting expressions of interest, from any member of the academic staff, in compiling a radio series on any subject. I responded with this proposal, and they liked it. There is hardly anything that I have enjoyed working on as much as I enjoyed working on that. But, I have to admit, it was a real eye opener for me. Philosophers pride themselves on taking for granted as little as possible; but this whole exercise made me realize just how much we do take for granted. My producer acted as my target audience, that is to say she was an intelligent lay person with due interest in the subject but with no background expertise in it; and she kept saying things like, ‘You can’t presuppose that. Only a professional philosopher will know what you’re getting at!’ or even, ‘You can’t say that. Only a professional philosopher would use that word!’ When it came to the word ‘finitude’, I simply didn’t believe her—until I googled it and saw that all the examples of its use seemed to be in philosophical articles and books (in a couple of cases, my own). It was a salutary experience.

When did you find your philosophical voice?

As soon as I began to publish, I guess. I recently (in 2019) brought out a collection of some of my articles, and I had no qualms about including three very early publications in this collection, one of which I wrote when I still had my Lecturership at Univ and two of which I wrote during the first year of my JRF at King’s. I found, on re-reading these, that very little of their content, tenor, or style seemed alien to me. Of course, I also saw some things that I would later have done differently and for that matter some claims from which I would later have distanced myself, and in some cases I felt that I had no choice but to make amendments before republication. But they were minor amendments; and they were more often a matter of presentation than of content. By contrast, when I now look back on my doctoral thesis, a lot of it does seem alien to me. A lot of it seems clumsy and naïve. Given that there was a gap of only a couple of years between the time when I finished my doctorate and the time when I wrote that early article at Univ, I must not only have found my philosophical voice during that gap, I must have found it quite quickly. What the explanation for this is, I don’t know. But I can rule out two specious explanations. It wasn’t because I no longer felt constrained by the demands of writing a doctoral thesis. For I’d never really felt constrained by those demands in the first place. No doubt I should have done. No doubt I should have cited more in my thesis than I did, and spent more time mapping the terrain than I did, and not painted with anything like as broad a brush as I did. I’m grateful, in retrospect, both to my supervisor and to my examiners for allowing me to get away with this! Nor is the explanation that obtaining my doctorate had given me confidence to experiment philosophically. For I’d never been particularly lacking in that kind of confidence. Indeed I might have possessed more of it then than I do now. If I were supervising a clone of myself now, then I’m pretty sure that I would be spending a lot of my time trying to bring him down a peg or two!

Anyway, the fact is that at some point in the immediate aftermath of finishing my doctorate, that is at some point in the mid 1980s, I began to produce philosophical work of a kind that I now feel reasonably comfortable identifying with.

What is (or was) your writing routine?

It is, just as it has always been, pretty rigid. In fact during a lengthy period of sustained writing, my routine is not unlike that of a typical nine-to-five job. I’m liable to start at the same time each day, early to mid morning, and to finish at the same time each day, late afternoon to early evening, with a break for lunch. My graduate friends often used to tease me for putting my pen down at precisely 6 p.m., no matter what stage I was at in my writing—even if I was in the middle of a sentence! It wasn’t quite as regimented as that. But it wasn’t far off. And it still isn’t. I certainly have no qualms about finishing in the middle of a sentence, provided that I’m confident that I have a good enough grasp of what I’m trying to do with the sentence to be able to pick up where I have left off the following day. Only very occasionally will I work late into the evening (and I have never done an ‘all-nighter’, not even as an undergraduate). When I do work late into the evening, this is usually because I’m so absorbed in something that I can’t stop or because I’m sufficiently unconfident that I can pick up where I have left off not to want to take the risk. A typical day’s writing for me involves spending the morning going over what I have written the previous day to see whether, with the benefit of a refreshed pair of eyes, it still looks acceptable—and making due amendments in the many places where it doesn’t—then spending the afternoon writing new material. But ‘typical’ is the operative word: there have always been days when the pattern of writing has been quite different from this.

Were you commissioned to write Points of View?

No. I just decided to write that book off my own bat, in the hope that, once I had written it, I could interest a publisher in it. The same is true, incidentally, of my third book, on Kant’s moral and religious philosophy, whose main title I took from Act II, Scene 2 of Hamlet. This was Noble in Reason, Infinite in Faculty: Themes and Variations in Kant’s Moral and Religious Philosophy. I submitted Points of View to OUP, and I submitted the Kant book to Routledge. They each agreed to publish what I had submitted, with some revisions suggested by their advisers.

Why did you go back to Oxford?

That’s an easy question to answer! I went back there for the simple reason that it was there that I submitted my first successful application for a permanent post. During the third year of my JRF at King’s I applied for lots of posts. I hadn’t yet reached the point of applying for everything though. In particular, I hadn’t yet reached the point of applying for posts outside the UK: it was still my strong preference to stay in the UK if possible. But no doubt I would have started casting my net wider if I’d still been on the job market in my fourth year. I got shortlisted for several of the posts that I applied for. But it was the post at St Hugh’s College—where I still am—that was the first to be offered me. As it happens, it was a dream post: Oxford is probably one of the two or three best places in the world to be a professional philosopher, and I still had lots of friends back there. But, given how bad the job market was, and given that I was now intent on pursuing an academic career, I would have accepted the offer even if it had been nothing like as attractive. I just got very lucky.

You’ve been at Oxford for a long time!

Yes, I’ve been in Oxford—and at St Hugh’s—for over thirty years. There have been opportunities to move away. On a couple of occasions, I have seriously considered doing so. But the truth is I am very happy here. I’m especially happy at St Hugh’s, which has a reputation—a justified reputation, I should add—for being a particularly friendly and relaxed college. It was originally a women’s college (it went mixed only a couple of years before I joined it). That set the tone. Its aim has always been to admit as many students as possible from underrepresented groups.

Cool.

I was able to play a part in this in one of the first big administrative roles that I had in the college: within two years of my arrival I was appointed Tutor for Admissions, and one of my responsibilities was to engage in outreach work, which meant that I was able to visit lots of schools with academically gifted pupils from groups who weren’t duly represented in Oxford, hence pupils who might not otherwise have considered applying, in the hope that I could encourage them to do so. I had a three-year stint in that role (which is fairly typical of jobs of this kind).

Tell me more about administrative work. This is a part of our job we rarely talk about!

In subsequent years I have had two other big administrative roles in the college: I have acted as Tutor for Undergraduates, with special responsibility for matters of academic discipline and admin affecting undergraduates; and I was until recently Vice Principal, which meant, among other things, that I deputized for the Principal on occasions when circumstances prevented her from carrying out her normal duties. I have had some big administrative roles in the Philosophy Faculty and in the wider University too. I’ll say a bit more about each of these, but before I do it’s perhaps worth pausing to mention an anomalous feature of most academic posts in Oxford. Most of us have two employers: we receive two independent pay cheques at the end of each month. I am employed both by St Hugh’s and by the University (albeit it’s a condition of my being employed by either that I should continue to be employed by the other—so I couldn’t, for instance, resign from St Hugh’s without resigning from the University as well). I have quite different duties pertaining to each. I won’t bore you with the details. Suffice to say that the administrative roles that I’m about to mention, unlike the ones that I’ve already mentioned, are roles that I’ve had in my capacity as an employee of the University, not the College. (Well, that’s not strictly true—nothing in Oxford is ever quite as straightforward as that!—but it’s true enough for these purposes.) Anyway, I have served as Chair of the Faculty, or rather of the Sub-Faculty as it was then: until just after the turn of the century there was no independent Philosophy Faculty in Oxford, only a Sub-Faculty of Literae Humaniores. I have also served as REF Coordinator. ‘REF’ stands for ‘the Research Excellence Framework’, which is the current name for the (roughly) sexennial research assessment exercise whereby the allocation of research funding in British universities is determined. This exercise is a time-consuming, energy-sapping, bureaucratic absurdity about which I could say much more, but I’ll restrain myself. My job was to overview the Philosophy Faculty’s submission for the 2014 version of this exercise. And finally, I am just over half way through a ten-year stint as Philosophy Delegate to OUP. Of all the administrative roles that I’ve had, this is by some distance the one that I’ve enjoyed most. Or perhaps, given what some of the others have been like, it would be better to say that it’s the one that I’ve disliked least. In fact, I’ve found it fascinating. It’s the Delegates’ responsibility to approve every contract signed with the Press. So not only do I get an insight into what is going on in philosophy, I get a chance to see what is going on in other disciplines too. The philosophy list for OUP has always been outstanding, thanks in no small measure to Peter Momtchiloff, who has been the Press’s Philosophy Editor for the past thirty years or so. It’s been great to be able to see, at a very early stage in the process, all the exciting new material that is coming through. Oh yes, and a significant perk of this job is that I have an account that gives me practically unlimited access to OUP books. (I say ‘practically’ unlimited, because it isn’t actually unlimited although, given how much there is in the account, it might as well be.)

Low points in your career?

I can think of a couple of conferences that I attended that were real low points for me. Don’t get me wrong: they were great conferences, with great papers. In fact, that was precisely the problem. I’ve never been good on my feet—I am much slower on the uptake than most professional philosophers—and these conferences stood out as frustrating occasions on which I completely failed to take advantage of the fact that I was surrounded by people with first-class minds talking about the very philosophical issues that most exercised me. For the record, they were also occasions on which I made quite a fool of myself.

High points in your career?

One was certainly being awarded a three-year Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship, from 2006 to 2009. This gave me an uninterrupted period of research, during which I was relieved of all teaching and admin responsibilities. And it came at a time when I was due a year’s sabbatical leave anyway, so I had four years of research time altogether. It was during this period that I wrote my book The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics. The story behind how I came to write this was as follows. Paul Guyer and Gary Hatfield were General Editors of a CUP series entitled The Evolution of Modern Philosophy. Each book in this series was intended to chart the evolution of some branch of philosophy from the beginning of the modern era to the present. Like Ted Honderich, who had approached me to write for the Problems of Philosophy series, Paul and Gary approached me to see if I was interested in contributing to their series, although, unlike him, they had a specific proposal for me: they wondered if I was interested in contributing a book on metaphysics. Once again I was struck by how many of my philosophical interests this would allow me to pursue, so I said yes. As before, the publishers wanted a detailed outline of what I planned to do. I provided one, they approved it, and I signed a contract with them. The result, at just over six hundred pages, is comfortably my fattest book. I really enjoyed being able to devote myself to that one big project.

Ambitious! Obstacles?

I had a fight with my publishers CUP, which I eventually lost. I had always thought of the book’s full title as Making Sense of Things: The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics. They told me that I had to switch the main title and the subtitle. The reason they gave was that search engines don’t pick up on subtitles, and I had to give as clear an indication as possible in the main title what the book was about. No doubt they were right. But to this day I regret that my book doesn’t have the title that I originally wanted it to have. The book’s subject matter is the evolution of modern metaphysics, for sure. But its fundamental leitmotif is making sense of things, and I wanted this to be what first caught the reader’s attention.

Incidentally, I had a similar fight with Routledge when I wrote my book on Kant.. They said it wasn’t sensible to have a main title that gave away so little of the book’s subject matter. That fight I won. I dare say the fact that my CUP book has been considerably more successful than my Routledge book is some vindication of the stance taken by both publishers!

In your estimation, what’s your most important contribution to philosophy (so far)?

Well, harking back to what I have just said, by far my two most successful books have been The Infinite and The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics. (The Infinite has been the most successful. In 2019 I brought out a third edition of it, which included two new chapters and a new technical appendix. As with my collection of essays, I found, when I was working on this new edition, that not much in the first edition seemed alien to me. Even so, some of it did. The two new chapters gave me a welcome opportunity for some redress.)

But actually I think that my two other books, Points of View and the book on Kant, are better. They’re certainly more original. I think Points of View is the best. These latter two books are similar to the two more successful books, in as much as I paint with a broad brush in both of them. But they’re not surveys in the same way as those other two. In each case, I have a more distinctive philosophical trajectory of my own that I’m trying to pursue. I wish I could say that my most important contribution to philosophy has been the critique of human finitude that I try to develop in those two books, but perhaps it’s a good thing that I can’t say that, because no doubt it would sound insufferably pretentious.

I suppose my most important contribution to philosophy has been to encourage a kind of open-mindedness. I’m thinking in particular of the opposition that still exists between analytic philosophy and—I can never help adding the scare quotes—‘continental’ philosophy. Both traditions are represented in my work. I have no idea whether I have got anyone who’s immersed in either to take the other more seriously, but I do think that I have offered encouragement to those who already take them both seriously by helping them to feel that they’ve got nothing to apologize for.

How have you evolved as a teacher?

I think the Oxford tutorial system has meant that I’ve become more and more attuned to Wittgenstein’s dictum that ‘philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity.’ The tutorial system enables us (tutors) to take for granted that our students will have already done enough background reading on the week’s topic to be apprised of the basic ideas; we are then free, in the tutorial, to focus on whatever the students themselves have chosen to focus on in their essays and to discuss their own ideas. In other words we’re free to engage in philosophy as an activity, without feeling under any obligation to impart anything that might be called ‘received wisdom’. When I first began conducting tutorials, I used to go into each one thinking, ‘I’d better make sure that the students understand x, y, and z by the end of this hour.’ But now I have no such preconceptions. It’s quite common for me to conduct two tutorials on a given topic that have almost nothing—almost no subject matter, that is—in common. In that respect I think I’ve become a better teacher, or at any rate a better tutor.

Lectures are a different matter. And that signals a respect in which I fear that I’ve become a worse tutor. I think I now have more of a tendency than I used to have, even when I’m being responsive to what my students have written in their essays, to go into ‘lecture’ mode rather than to engage them in discussion. As for lecturing itself, on the rare occasions when I do lecture—it’s not a staple of my normal teaching stint—I’m less prone than I used to be to cram in too much. I remember a colleague of mine once saying that we typically become better lecturers as we get older and worse tutors. I don’t think that’s quite true of me, for the reasons I’ve given, but I can see why he said it.

Love the honesty but I’m sure you are being too harsh on yourself! How do you write about broad topics, such as the evolution of metaphysics, in a philosophical era preoccupied with small scale problems?

That’s a really good question. Not that I mean to suggest that the others haven’t been really good questions too! I agree that this is an era in which philosophers are preoccupied with small-scale problems, certainly in the analytic tradition. Another way to put the point is that it’s an era of intense specialism. And it’s easy to understand why. Academics in general, and philosophers in particular, need to make their mark on their profession in order to progress, and the only realistic way that they have of doing this, at least at an early stage in their careers, is by writing about very specific issues to which they can make a genuinely distinctive contribution. I can understand this. But it doesn’t stop me from lamenting it. It’s bad enough, in my view, that there is as much specialism in academia as there is, as a result of which philosophy itself gets pursued without due regard for other disciplines. But the sort of specialism that we’re talking about here—specialism within philosophy—means that there’s a danger that it will end up not being pursued at all, in any meaningfully integrated way. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not denying the need for specialists. Nor am I denying that much of the specialist work that gets done in philosophy these days is excellent. It’s just that I think we need generalists too, people who are interested in looking at the bigger picture, people who are interested in making sense of the many different kinds of sense that the specialists make; and I think it’s less and less easy for philosophers to contemplate doing that sort of thing. It’s relatively easy for me, because I’m a geriatric and I don’t need to worry about job security or career prospects. But it’s not at all easy for younger people in the profession, or those trying to get into it. And when I have graduate students who are inclined to generalism I find myself torn between encouraging them and warning them. Anyway, to get back to your question—how do I write about broad topics in this era?—the answer is that I rely very heavily, more heavily than most of my colleagues, on other people’s expertise. I see myself as engaged, a lot of the time, in a kind of synthesis, including synthesis of other people’s work. I like to think that I’m forging interesting connections, and noticing interesting patterns. I’ve always enjoyed this way of doing philosophy. I wouldn’t find it at all easy to be the specialist that so many philosophers these days feel constrained to be.

Can it be overwhelming, anticipating all of the possible objections, given there are so many people working on related subtopics, and given these issues have been discussed for such a long time? How do you manage all of that?

Oh, yes, it can be very overwhelming. As I’ve just indicated, a lot of the time I’m writing about issues in which I can’t claim expertise; and a lot of the time I’m writing about issues to which others, who can claim expertise, have devoted lifetimes of research. There are bound to be objections to the claims I make, including objections that I wouldn’t be able to anticipate even if I tried. I just have to hope that there’s value in what I’m doing, if only sometimes the value of prompting the experts to put me right and to give us a better appreciation of the connections that are there to be forged and of the patterns that are there to be discerned. How do I manage all of this? In part, I think, by having a relatively thick philosophical skin.

How would you say the field has changed in the past thirty years?

Well, one change is the one we touched on earlier. Philosophy has become more and more specialized. Analytic philosophy has also become more and more technical. There are articles in ethics that look like articles in mathematics. In some ways I welcome this increase in technicality, because in some ways it’s an antidote to the increase in specialization. Remember I said earlier that I was sorry that philosophy gets pursued without due regard for other disciplines. Often the increase in technicality results from bucking that trend—for instance, when philosophers of language take account of work in linguistics, or when people working in social and political philosophy take account of work in economics, or, for that matter, when ethicists take account of work in mathematics. But in other ways I find the increase in technicality as disturbing as the increase in specialization, because it’s another aspect of the tendency to ignore the bigger picture. (I don’t think you can properly think about the bigger picture in technical terms. I won’t say any more now about why not. That’s a huge issue in its own right.) When an article in ethics looks like an article in mathematics, it’s always worth taking a step back and asking, ‘What does this have to do with the place of ethics in our lives? How does this help us to make ethical sense of things?’ Again, don’t misunderstand me. I’m not claiming that, when we take that step back and ask those sorts of questions, there are never any good answers. Technicalities are sometimes very helpful, for instance in combating confusions that are preventing us from seeing anything at all—whether the bigger picture or some smaller picture—with any clarity. But the technicalities are then just a means to an end. When they become an end in themselves, the step back is liable to draw a blank.

What do you make of the criticism that, traditionally, analytic philosophy is often too disengaged from real world political issues?

It’s a very fair criticism. It’s closely related to what I’ve just been saying. Analytic philosophy is often too disengaged from real world political issues because it prevents its practitioners from seeing the bigger picture. It’s not that I think that analytic philosophy has to be engaged with real world political issues: there are plenty of philosophical issues that have their own independent apolitical interest and importance. Nor do I even think that it has to be concerned with the bigger picture. But something has obviously gone wrong if it proceeds in such a way that it can’t be either of these things; after all, one of the subjects that analytic philosophers ought to be able to philosophize about is politics. Having said all of that, I should make clear that there’s a lot of analytic philosophy that I think escapes the criticism. I would cite a lot of feminist work, for instance.

Also, we shouldn’t forget the extent to which thinking clearly and critically, along with training other people to think clearly and critically, is itself a political undertaking of sorts. I’m not suggesting that analytic philosophers—or philosophers of any other kind, come to that, or even academics more generally, come to that—have a monopoly on thinking clearly and critically, or on training other people to think clearly and critically. Obviously they don’t. But, at its best, analytic philosophy does foster clear and critical thinking. And that can have significant political benefits. It can have such benefits even if what goes on on the training ground is clear and critical thinking about something that is of no real political concern at all, such as—oh, I don’t know—the set of all those sets that don’t belong to themselves.

How do you see the future of philosophy?

I can’t see the trend towards greater and greater specialism ending any time soon. But I can see more engagement with real world political issues. That is, I can see some redress to the problem that we were just talking about. This is because humanity has recently begun to confront political issues that it hasn’t had to confront in the past: issues about artificial intelligence, for instance, or environmental ethics, or the possible advent of the ‘post-human’. So there are new questions for philosophers to address, and—I’m thinking back to the point I made earlier about the demands of the profession—there are new questions for philosophers to make a name for themselves addressing!

You edit MIND. Right now, that’s one of the best journals out there according to many.

I need to issue a correction! I co-edit MIND. For the first time in its history, the journal has two editors. The other is Lucy O’Brien, who has been a dear friend of mine for many years. We got to know each other when she was a doctoral student in Oxford. In fact, I supervised her during the final year of her doctorate. Not that I ever felt that I gave her much help with her thesis: it always seemed to me that she had done all the real work on it before I got involved! Lucy’s editorship is historically significant because she’s the journal’s first woman editor. I have no such claim to fame: I’m not even the first editor of the journal to be called Moore.

Ha!

But anyway—yes, I co-edit MIND, which I think does have a reputation for being one of the two or three best philosophy journals in the world. And I’ve thoroughly enjoyed co-editing it, by the way. I’ve been doing it for about five years, and I envisage keeping going for at least another five. Like my work as Philosophy Delegate to OUP, it’s been a great way to keep in touch with what’s going on in the discipline.

Advice for people trying to publish in MIND?

I’m going to be really unhelpful, I’m afraid. There’s no advice I can give. We get a colossal number of submissions, currently around nine hundred a year, and only a tiny minority of these are not good. Our task is to try to distinguish between the ‘merely’ good and the excellent. And although I could offer advice on how to write something good, it would be crazy for me to try to offer advice on how to write something excellent—which is the only advice that would be of any use. What I can do is to offer potential contributors the reassurance that we’re happy to publish philosophy of all kinds. We don’t exclude any area of philosophy, or any style, or any approach. Excellence is our sole criterion of publication. I’m not claiming that we always apply the criterion correctly. But it is the criterion—the criterion—that we try to apply. And I can also offer advice to anyone who submits an article that gets rejected. Don’t be discouraged! I speak from experience here: not editorial experience, but the experience of someone who has in the past submitted several articles to MIND that have been rejected and found a home elsewhere!

Any major world events—political events, technological innovations, cultural changes or trends, etc.—that have had a significant impact on your life and worldview during your time at Oxford?

Wow, that’s a massive question! I’m not sure where to begin. Perhaps I’ll begin with something negative. Technological innovations and cultural changes have affected me less than most. I don’t have a smartphone. I don’t do social media. I still live a bit in the past as far as all of that goes. As for the rest, I have the same sort of interest as the next person in the big events: the growth of China, Britain’s exit from the EU, climate change, etc. Have any of these had a significant impact on my life or on my worldview? Definitely. But I don’t know what to say about this that won’t either be inordinately long or just sound banal. However, I can’t resist a brief if relatively trite comment about Covid-19. (I’m answering these questions during the pandemic.) I count myself really fortunate, as an academic, to be living a life that has been much less affected by the virus than most people’s. But what the virus has done, paradoxically, is bring me more into touch with people than I would normally be—phoning friends that I often don’t talk to for long periods to reassure myself that they’re O.K., running errands for neighbours who are confined to their homes, that sort of thing.

Thoughts on philosophical activity, and philosophers, on the internet? Good parts? Bad parts?

You’re asking the wrong person, I’m afraid. I’m not really into that sort of thing. Or am I? Perhaps I am, come to think of it! I’ve always been delighted when I’ve been asked to make contributions to online series; and I’ve made quite a few of them, to series that I think are really good. Damn it, this interview is one of them! And my radio series appears online. So no; I can’t claim that I’m not really into that sort of thing. O.K., then—I think it’s great that there’s philosophy on the internet! Whether there’s anything especially good or especially bad about how philosophy is done on the internet, I’m not so sure. I suspect that what’s good about how it’s done there isn’t significantly different from what’s good about how it’s done in any other forum; and that what’s bad about how it’s done there isn’t significantly different from what’s bad about how it’s done in any other forum.

Thanks man! General question: What’s the difference between philosophy of science and of religion and of art (if any)?

What are the differences between science, religion, and art themselves for that matter? Of course, this is itself a philosophical question. And actually that goes some way towards answering your own question, because it shows that the philosophies of each of these things must have a significant common component. An important part of what it is to philosophize about art, for example, is to think about how art compares and contrasts with science. But that’s an important part of what it is to philosophize about science as well. For instance, is it only artists who tell stories, or do scientists? Is it only scientists who seek the truth, or do artists? If there are little green aliens out there, is there any more reason to expect their science to be assimilable to ours than there is to expect their art to be assimilable to ours? It’s all a matter of trying to make sense of the various fundamental ways in which we engage with the world. Even so, you won’t get far in the philosophy of x unless you have a reasonably good grasp of x, and it won’t be long before any reasonably good grasp of x raises philosophical questions that are peculiarly about x. So there are differences between the philosophies of each of these things too. What differences? Well, that’s pretty much where we came in. That’s pretty much the question of what differences there are between science, religion, and art themselves. It’s all very reflexive.

What the f--- is philosophy?

Aha, I can understand the frustration behind this question! It gets worse, though. For this question is itself a philosophical question. (I’m reminded of that anecdote about my friend’s grandmother and her boyfriend that I told you about earlier!) In effect, you’re inviting me to state my position in the philosophy of philosophy. Philosophizing about the world is just another of the fundamental ways in which we engage with the world, and the philosophy of philosophy is just another instance of the philosophy of x. So, just as we can ask how art compares and contrasts with science, so too we can ask how philosophy compares and contrasts with either of those, or how it compares and contrasts with religion. And all I’ll say is that I think it’s importantly similar to each of them and importantly different from each of them. There!—how much more vacuous did you think I could get? O.K., I’ll throw in another anecdote as well.

A few years ago the fourteen-year-old daughter of a friend of mine was beginning to study philosophy at high school. Her very first homework assignment was to think of five examples of philosophical questions and five examples of non-philosophical questions. She asked me if she could talk it through with me. I said, ‘Sure.’ We quite quickly got into a heady discussion of how to distinguish between the two kinds of questions. After a while I said, ‘You can see what’s happening here, can’t you?’—and to my delight she could. She said, ‘Yes, what we’ve been discussing is a philosophical question!’ So she put this down as her first example of a philosophical question: ‘What is a philosophical question?’ And I remember thinking, ‘The teacher’s going to love that.’ But the teacher didn’t love it. He’d taught them, very roughly—I realize I may be about to do him a disservice, but I don’t think I’m about to do him a gross disservice—that a philosophical question was one such that there wasn’t any definite procedure for answering it, while a non-philosophical question was one such that there was some definite procedure for answering it. And ‘What is a philosophical question?’ belonged to the latter category: there was a definite procedure for answering it, which was just to invoke the teacher’s categorization. Suffice to say that my friend’s daughter vowed never to seek my help with her philosophical homework again.

Ha! What would your teenage self make of your current self?

I think he would have recognized a lot of himself in me, and I think he would largely have approved. Oh dear, what does that say about my former self and about my present self? Does it make us both sound smug? But I like to think that there is a more charitable gloss. I like to think that it illustrates something that I have long maintained and that I mentioned earlier: that philosophers are people who have never really grown up. Philosophers like to ask the questions that children like to ask, and they like to persist with these questions beyond the point at which answers have been provided that satisfy most grown-ups.

I think my friend’s daughter’s teacher was being too grown-up. He’d got a way of pigeon-holing things which put a stop to our inquiry about the nature of philosophy. But my friend’s daughter, I think, was being more philosophical: she was prepared to persist with the inquiry, beyond a simple appeal to his authority, and she also noticed something that no pigeon-holing would ever have helped her to notice, namely that her own efforts to characterize what is involved in addressing a philosophical question were an instance of the very thing that she was trying to characterize. I think this illustrates another respect in which philosophers are people who have never really grown up: it doesn’t take much to make them very self-conscious!

Not a bad theory. If you could give yourself advice back then, what would it be?

Perhaps—in light of my answer to the previous question—not to be overly concerned about the demands of growing up!

Interesting projects on the horizon?

I’ve been doing some collaborative work with two former graduate students of mine, Anil Gomes and Andrew Stephenson. Anil and I co-led an extra-mural weekend symposium on Kant’s metaphysics a few years ago, during the course of which we discovered an exegetical disagreement between us of which we’d previously been totally unaware. Not only that: it concerned an issue that each of us would previously have said wasn’t a bone of exegetical contention at all. Anil subsequently discussed the issue with Andrew, and found that Andrew was on his side. The three of us then talked a lot more about it, and we began to realize that it was much more complicated than any of us had supposed. So we’ve been working collaboratively on something in which we say what the issue is, outline the various considerations that bear on it, try to say what hangs on it, and then leave our readers to make up their own minds.

I’ve also been commissioned to write A Very Short Introduction to Gödel’s Theorem, which I’m looking forward to. The main problem that I shall face is that there are some excellent resources already in existence that introduce people to Gödel’s theorem, including the classic Gödel’s Proof which Nagel and Newman published in 1959, so I shall need to think hard about what I can do that hasn’t already been done—and been done at least as effectively as I can do it. Finally, I’ve already remarked on how much I enjoyed the radio work that I did. I’d love to do some more media work of that kind.

What drives you? Like, what really drives you?

You’re going to hate me (if you don’t hate me already). I don’t know how to answer this question. Does it follow that nothing really drives me?—because, if it did, I would be in no doubt that it did, so I would know how to answer this question? Discuss.

Recent music recommendations?

I’ve been re-immersing myself in old favourites recently. One thing that’s relevant is the fact that I’m answering these questions in 2020—the relevance being that it’s the 250th anniversary of the birth of Beethoven, which means that there has been a lot of Beethoven on the radio (and there was a lot of Beethoven being performed live before Covid-19 struck). I can’t get enough of Beethoven. Mind you, the exposure has meant that I haven’t just been listening to old favourites, I’ve been listening to (and really enjoying) some of his lesser known works too. For instance, I recently heard Daniel Barenboim playing the least known of his piano concertos, Number 2, and I was reminded of what a beautiful concerto it is. And I recently heard something that I’d never heard before: his Romance Cantabile for piano, flute, bassoon, and orchestra. Lovely!

Books?

I’ve been re-reading some Iris Murdoch recently. She’s like Beethoven for me: I can’t get enough of her. The last of her novels that I re-read is also, as it happens, the first of hers that I ever read, The Sacred and Profane Love Machine. It’s not among my favourites (except in the sense that all her novels are among my favourites, but you know what I mean). I prefer The Black Prince, A Word Child, and The Sea, The Sea. It’s still a gem, though.

Movies?

A favourite movie that I saw again recently, on television, is Annie Hall. Again, there are other Woody Allen movies that I prefer: Manhattan, Hannah and her Sisters, even Love and Death. But I still find Annie Hall laugh-out-loud funny. As I do, incidentally, all of Murdoch’s novels. It never ceases to amaze me when people say that they can’t see the humour in her work—including people who are otherwise big fans of hers. I think she’s hilarious.

Annie Hall! Manhattan! Good stuff. Who do you hang, and talk shop, with nowadays?

I don’t spend anything like as much time with Anil Gomes and Andrew Stephenson, whom I mentioned earlier, as I would like to—Andrew’s no longer in Oxford—but I do really enjoy talking shop with both of them. I also enjoy talking shop with my Oxford colleague Anita Avramides, who has been a close friend ever since we were graduate students, and whose philosophical sensibilities are very much in line with mine. Mind you, whenever we get together, we always have so much gossip to catch up on that we leave ourselves hardly any time to philosophize! That’s true of Anil too. The problem is exacerbated in his case by the fact that he’s another Manchester City fan, so there’s always a lot of football for us to discuss. When I was teaching Anil, we used to allow ourselves the luxury, at the beginning of each supervision, of a fixed amount of time discussing football, and then, after the allotted time, no matter how interesting the discussion, we would make sure that the guillotine came down so that we could turn our attention to philosophy.

I earlier mentioned my friend Phil Turetzky. He and I Skype a lot and have pretty heavy philosophical conversations whenever we do—mostly about Spinoza and Deleuze, two common interests. While Pamela Anderson was still alive (not that Pamela Anderson!—I’m talking about the philosopher who used to publish as Pamela Sue Anderson and who was a member of the Philosophy Faculty here in Oxford), she and I spent a lot of time together and talked a lot of shop together. She died of cancer three and a half years ago, and I still miss her terribly. There are plenty of other people in the Philosophy Faculty that I really like to spend time with and talk shop with, as there are elsewhere, but I’m not going to list them for fear that I forget someone who ends up reading this and being affronted!

King of philosophy, what’s your first move?

Can I make this specific to British philosophy?

You’re the king!

In one of my earlier answers I mentioned the REF, as it’s now known—the process whereby British academics have their research assessed every few years. The method of assessment changes from one exercise to the next, but one thing that has stayed constant is that it has increased the pressure on us to publish. A lot of academics complain about this pressure. And one of the most common complaints is that it results in a lot of bad work. But whenever people say this, I find myself thinking, ‘If only…!’ It’s much worse than that. It results in a lot of good work. It would be great if we could be confident that most of what was being churned out was rubbish that could be comfortably ignored. But no! What’s being churned out is material that really does deserve other people’s attention—even though nobody stands any chance of consulting more than a tiny fraction of it, indeed even though nobody stands any chance of consulting more than a tiny fraction of what’s directly relevant to their own interests. More to the point, it’s material that could have been distilled into something both briefer and of higher quality. I remember reflecting on this with a colleague once. She agreed with me, and then she said, ‘Think how much better it would be if there weren’t some minimum number of publications that we were supposed to produce in each six-year period, but a maximum—two, say—with penalties imposed whenever anyone produces more! Think of the care that would be devoted to the production of each person’s two outputs, the time and effort that would be invested to make sure that they were really significant pieces of work. Think of the time that would be freed up for us to read one another’s publications.’ And she was surely right. So I’m going to say that, if I were king of philosophy, my first move would be to impose significant penalties on anyone who published more than two journal articles or one monograph in any six-year period. (And actually, come to think of it, this needn’t just apply here in Britain. I’m going to say that you guys in the US would be liable to the same penalties!)

I’m down. If you could ask an omniscient being one question, what would it be?

Ha! As I’m sure you know, there’s a whole philosophical industry devoted to this! Lots of people have written articles about what the best question to ask an omniscient being would be. Questions such as the following have been proposed: ‘If you were to tell me the best question that I could ask you, other than this one, and were then to tell me the answer to that question, what would you tell me?’ Or ‘What would it be best for me to know that I don’t know already?’ And then there’s been lengthy debate about whether these questions fall foul of certain paradoxes whereby the omniscient being could answer truthfully but uncooperatively and leave the questioner none the wiser! But you’ll be relieved to hear that I’m going to bypass all of that. I’m going to play this one straight. I’ll presuppose cooperation on the part of the omniscient being, and I won’t attempt any reflexive fancy footwork in my question. What I’d ask (believe it or not) is this: ‘What is the physical truth behind the Biblical accounts of Jesus’ resurrection from the dead?’ It wouldn’t surprise me in the least if the omniscient being, however cooperative, was forced to explain to me that my question didn’t admit of a simple answer. The only thing that would surprise me would be an appeal of some kind to a violation of a law of nature.

Last meal?

Hmm. There’s an ambiguity in that question. ‘Last’ in the sense of ‘final’? Or ‘last’ in the sense of ‘most recent’? I assume you mean ‘last’ in the sense of ‘final’! Who the hell wants to know what my most recent meal was? Still, the ambiguity is relevant to my answer. Do you remember that remark that Wittgenstein is reputed to have made: that he didn’t mind what he ate, as long as it was always the same thing? I have no idea whether Wittgenstein did say this, nor whether he really would always have chosen to eat the same thing. But it would have meant that the ambiguity made no difference in his case! And I can see the appeal of that. I enjoy food, in fact I enjoy food very much indeed, but I enjoy it in an unsophisticated way, and I also derive enormous comfort from repetition and routine. I think that if my choice of last meal came at a point at which I’d been having the same meal for a long time—whether as a result of incarceration, or because of sheer force of habit, or for some other reason—then I might well ask to have it once again, this one last time.

Thanks, Adrian. It’s been fun!

[interviewer: Cliff Sosis]