What Is It Like to Be a Philosopher?

In this interview, Robert Stern, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sheffield, talks about growing up in  a Jewish community in Norwich, pretending to be King Arthur, Lord of the Flies, a brutal but effective preparatory teacher, being exposed to British Idealism as a young man, reading The Story of Philosophy, Francis Bacon, a trip to Disneyland, Bob Dylan, the Cold War, a summer at a kibbutz, studying in isolation at Cambridge, Hugh Mellor, hedgehogs and foxes, getting into Hegel thanks to Edward Craig, working at the theatre, scholasticism, religion, science and the practical significance of philosophy, meeting the love of his life, the history of garbage and scholarship, escaping Wittgenstein, what Hegel meant by Spirit, his first book, getting a gig at Sheffield, where he’s been for nearly thirty five years, love and the Radical Demand in Løgstrup’s Ethics, soggy liberalism, God, The Road, revisiting the creative fiction of Iris Murdoch, Oppenheimer, Everything Everywhere All at Once, Breaking Bad, Derry Girls, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, being diagnosed with brain cancer with a short life expectancy, death, fear, hope, and memory…

[10/26/2023]

What was your earliest memory? Where did you grow up?

Oddly enough, I don’t think I have any early actual memories. I suspect that much of what I seem to remember from my childhood in fact comes from the photos taken from when I was a baby onwards. For example, while I seem to recall posing as King Arthur (because my middle name is Arthur) with a sword and a stone when I was about 4, in fact I think this is just based on a photo from the family album.

I think my earliest real memory is staying in a caravan on the Norfolk coast with a couple called Molly and Tom. Molly was a ‘daily’ – a domestic help in our house. My mother was obsessive about cleanliness (despite also smoking 40 smelly cigarettes a day – go figure!), and even though she polished and hoovered the house herself every day, she insisted on Molly doing the chores with her. Molly and Tom were much liked, seen as ‘working class’ people, who had no kids of their own, and they were always very kind to me. They spent their annual week of holiday in a caravan by the sea, and from when I was about five years old, they invited me to stay with them for a couple of days each year. As I lay in bed, Tom brought me what he called ‘Norfolk tea’ every morning – which was tea with dash of brandy. They also took me to the bingo. In those days, the rules for kids were much more relaxed, and both were highlights of the stay. Tom also taught me ‘Hev Yew Gotta Loight Boy?’ by The Singing Postman, which was a hit in 1965, sung with a Norfolk accent.

We lived in Norwich, a pleasant historic city, but which was a bit of a backwater in the UK, being near to the east coast. In those days, this meant it took several hours to get to London, even though it is only about 100 miles away. Nonetheless, I was always proud of the place. When I was about 12, I was sent on a P&O cruise for youngsters around Turkey and Greece. We were made to keep a travel journal, which I still have. Embarrassingly enough, I compared all the wonderful places we visited, such as Istanbul and Athens, to Norwich, always finding them inferior in food, climate, and tidiness. What a prig I was! However, as a teenager even I began to feel the city was all a bit dull and provincial, and so instead hung out with my eldest brother in London whenever I could.

What was the culture in Norwich like?

Because of its relative isolation from the rest of the UK, Norwich had its own culture, including a thriving art school, ageing hippies, and a 1960s university which was doing well. It also had a good professional theatre, a flourishing amateur theatre which my parents were keen on, and a large Odeon cinema with a massive screen, which was the style before they were divided up to show more films. I remember seeing Star Wars in this vast format, and James Bond movies. There was also an arts cinema, which I went to regularly, a decent museum in Norwich Castle, and lots of second-hand book shops, as well as several cafes that felt rather cool at the time. I was an occasional visitor to Norwich City football matches with my Dad, although I was never a properly devoted fan.

As well as these various activities, another important factor was that I grew up in a Jewish family, which was deeply embedded in the slightly eccentric Norwich community. This community had been established in the middle ages, but partly because there was a notorious pogrom there in 1190, and partly because it is in a farming area (which isn’t generally a Jewish line of work), the community has always been quite small. It was officially orthodox and there was no real ‘liberal’ community alongside it (which I think there is now). However, whilst there was a synagogue (rebuilt after the Victorian building was destroyed in the Second World War, and opposite a rather intimidatingly impressive Catholic cathedral), it could not support a proper rabbi, and made do with a minister who had generally retired from some other work. My parents were very involved, because they had both been born in the Jewish community in London. My father had been brought up in Norwood, a Jewish orphanage. Even though his father was still alive, his mother had died after giving birth to their fourth child; in those days fathers were not expected to bring up their children alone. My father apparently had a pretty good experience in the orphanage and learnt to pronounce Hebrew words even though he couldn’t read or translate them – which is not that uncommon, and was the same for me, too. Thus, when they moved to Norwich, my parents became active members of the community, and I was brought up going to the synagogue regularly, leading to my bar mitzvah when I was 13, at which point (also not uncommonly) I dropped away.

Religious upbringing?

Both my schools were low-key, mainstream Church of England institutions. None of my classmates were Jewish, doubtless because there were so few Jews in the county. The Jewish community was also low-key – even though officially orthodox, virtually nobody was frum or kept a kosher household (including my parents), and no one had any serious theological interest or knowledge, including the minister. For most of the congregation, it was just the way of life they knew and made them comfortable. To my father, it was what he had grown up with: he knew how to say the various prayers, when to stand and sit at the right time in the service, and later in life he even learnt how to run a service himself. So, in one way it was clearly important to him. But in another way, if anyone were to ask him about a theological issue, or to challenge him regarding Judaic faith (as I did as I grew up, inevitably), he never really saw the need to engage. For him, religion wasn’t about such things – he believed in God, he took it that somehow the good were therefore rewarded while sinners were punished, and that was all he needed to know. And of course, he didn’t believe that Jesus was really the Messiah, as the Messiah was still due to arrive. But other than that, my father just enjoyed Jewish food and Jewish culture, while supporting Israel – for him, that was enough.

And your mother?

My mother was more engaged with theological questions, but mainly because she was also more questioning and sceptical by nature. While she was as committed to Jewish life as was my father, nonetheless she was unsure about the theology, and indeed whether any of it made sense at all – ‘God is just goodness’, she would often like to say. But while she read about some of the key questions and liked to try to provoke my father by raising them (which he benignly ignored – why would they matter to him?), her lack of a formal education held her back. Consequently, in this context, I was given a sense of philosophical questioning on the one side, but no sources of answers on the other. Naturally enough, from my bar mitzvah onwards, I thus became less and less interested in the religious life, as well as in the Norwich Jewish community. I slowly drifted into the atheistic world in which I have lived ever since – though now my philosophical work does relate to religion from a particular angle.

How did your parents meet? What did they do for a living?

Both my parents were children in the 1920s when antisemitism was growing throughout Europe (including in Britain). Coming from fairly working class backgrounds, they were not educated beyond the age of about 15. After a short period as a worker in the music business delivering records (where hearing some of them led him to develop a lifelong love of opera), my father quickly joined the Royal Navy. He had heard early on about the growing antisemitism in Nazi Germany, and never believed in Neville Chamberlain’s claim that there might be ‘peace for our time’. He met my mother at a dance (where she also sang), and they married quickly in 1939. My father was 24 and my mother 17. My eldest brother was born in 1943, and my mother moved around with him to meet my father when he came back for periods of training in various places in the UK. He rose from being an unranked sailor to becoming a Lieutenant. He did dangerous voyages across the Atlantic (though he was deeply impressed by the American cities where he stayed when waiting for his ship to go back), while at the end of the war he served as commander of a landing craft for tanks.

After the war ended in Europe in 1945, my father went into the jewelry business, moving first from London to Peterborough for a short time to run a shop with my mother’s brother, and then to Norwich where he had his own shop. Their only reason for choosing Norwich was that when they visited the East coast on holiday, my mother wanted a new dressing gown so did some shopping in the city, and they liked the feel of the place. They had three young boys by this time – a second had been born in 1947, the other in 1949.

Were your parents content?

They had the ambition for a more prosperous life, while they were self-taught in several areas including music, art, literature, and poetry, and so were willing to move beyond where they had been brought up by widening their horizons. Nonetheless, limits inevitably remained for both of them. My father had to work in the jewelry business until his retirement, as that was his only source of income. He accepted his situation, feeling satisfied enough with the successful business he built up, and being proud of his children instead of feeling constrained himself. My mother also felt this pride, as well as being determined that we should be properly educated. But despite this, she also had a sense of melancholy and boredom due to her confined life after the war, which left her very frustrated. So, while my father was always genial and much liked, my mother was a more complex individual. Although she could be lively and great fun, she could also be difficult. She doubtless would have been different if she had been able to develop her intellectual interests in a career of some kind, which was hard to do in this post-war period, particularly as a mother. She often said that her happiest time was the short period she worked in a munitions factory in the early years of WWII, making her own contribution to the war effort.

I came along into all this much later than my brothers, as there is a significant age gap between us: they are between 19 and 13 years older than me. I was clearly a mistake! When she got pregnant, my mother cried for 9 months while my father slinked around sheepishly – and his only argument in my favour was that after three boys, I was bound to be a girl, which unfortunately I was not… However, I am told that once I was born in February 1962, I charmed my mother to such an extent that she was in the end happy to see me – a strategy of mine that doubtless has some sort of evolutionary explanation.

As a little kid, what were you interested in?

Apart from playing at being King Arthur, my interests were all predictable. I always liked going to the sea, as my mother (who was herself an ardent swimmer) taught me to swim at a young age; I have always felt confident in the water. My father had a small vegetable garden, and I enjoyed messing around with him working on that; my mother was also a keen gardener, so I inherited that influence from them, as I now like to spend time pottering around in my own garden. Other than that, I did all the usual stuff, like cycle around aimlessly, watch TV, and stroke our cats. I didn’t read much – I only really got the hang of this when my mother, in her frustration, forced me to read Lord of the Flies when I was about 11, which was the first novel to get through to me.

How were you similar to, and different from, the rest of your friends and family?

Because I was so much younger than them, as mentioned above, I was always at a very different stage of life from my brothers: they became more like uncles to me. But they were always kind. They played with me when I was little, occasionally made me toys, and I visited them at various times as I got older. I don’t remember any particular friends when I was little. There weren’t many kids of my age at the synagogue, as the community was so small, although one of the girls I met has remained in connection over the years.

What did you want to be when you grew up?

I don’t think I had much of an idea. The main focus of my parents was to get me to university, but they didn’t push me in any particular direction after that – though of course they mentioned various obvious professions. I think my father may have vaguely hoped I might take over his jewelry business, which by then was pretty successful, and I worked there happily enough during its busy Christmas periods. However, I never really thought of it as a career, and to his credit, he never pressured me. My eldest brother read medicine in one of the main London hospitals, and became a psychiatrist, eventually becoming a consultant with a specialism in phobias; but I didn’t fancy that career either. My middle brother went his own hippyish way and drifted through various countries in the 60s before ending up in France, where he remains a rather old hippy to this day – but that path also wasn’t tempting to me. My third brother did an English degree at the University of York, and then an impressive PhD there on Lewis Carroll. He married one of his lecturers, who was always very kind to me. I think this may have given me the idea of an academic life, though my brother didn’t want a university post and instead became an astute dealer of antiquarian books. (Unfortunately, few of these have been in philosophy, though he did have a share in a Wittgenstein manuscript once, but I never saw it).

School?

My parents had expected to send me to the grammar school in Norwich, following my brothers. They had all passed the entrance exam that pupils took at 11 to get their place – the so-called ’11 plus’. If you did not pass, you went instead to a ‘secondary modern school’, in what was therefore a very hierarchical system. However, when my turn came in the 1970s, this system was being dismantled (though a small number of grammar schools still exist) and replaced by the comprehensive system, which admitted everyone to school based on just where they lived. As they were new, my parents worried that these schools were chaotic, and would be a less automatic route to university. By now, my father could afford the fees for a private school instead, and so I became the first person in my family to be educated outside the state system. I went to a day ‘preparatory’ (or ‘prep’) school called Town Close in Norwich, and then at 13 went to Gresham’s which is situated in Holt, a rural town about 20 miles from Norwich. Gresham’s had a long history and a good academic reputation, although it was not grand or elitist like Eton and Harrow. Most of the pupils were the children of wealthy farmers and local business people.

Favorite teachers?

One teacher from my prep school, Mr Stephen Parker, made a particular impact on me. He arrived when I was about 10. This was his first job, and he landed with a bang. He looked curious, with mutton chop whiskers and a tight black suit. He taught English, and his first essay question was “‘An Englishman’s Home Is His Castle”: Discuss’. We had never seen essays with that kind of title before – mostly they had been things like ‘What Did You Do on Your Holidays?’ or ‘Do You Prefer Autumn or Spring?’. So, we had no idea what the essay was meant to be about. Oddly enough, I deployed a kind of crime plot to answer most of the essays I had written previously (so Autumn and Spring became the names of detectives, for example), which had been tolerated by teachers thus far. So, as I was as confused as everyone else by the title that Mr Parker had set us, I tried the same trick again, and wrote a detective story about an Englishman with a castle – which in some ways wasn’t such a bad guess. But Mr Parker was utterly unimpressed, and gave me a zero mark, with an acidic comment – something like ‘this essay is hopeless, you are clearly a fool’. I went home to my mother and burst into tears – as did other classmates. (In those days, teachers were often much more brutal than is allowed today – but Mr Parker was the harshest that we had ever experienced.) This led many parents to go to the headmaster of the school to complain. But my mother didn’t. Instead, she explained the essay topic to me, provided a couple of arguments on one side and then the other which I wrote down, and she told me to give it to the teacher. To my amazement, Mr Parker then gave me a 10 out of 10, and said ‘a very good essay, well done!’. Looking back, that was my first encounter with the idea of an essay that contained a balanced argument, which I guess is the kind of essay I have been writing ever since….

Another English teacher who stood out was John Coleridge, who taught me from about 15 to 18 years old at Gresham’s. Mr Coleridge was much more genial than Mr Parker had been, and he was impressively widely read. He was also something of a writer and poet himself, though he never published much. He exposed me to lots of authors and styles, and I developed a particular love of T. S. Eliot. He of course wrote a PhD on F. H. Bradley, so I think it is through Eliot that I first came across British Idealism. I developed a rather standard love of literature –Dickens, George Eliot, Hardy and so on.

So, could you, like, take philosophy classes?

When I was at school in England in the 1970s, there was no option to study philosophy, though thankfully it can be done now. I therefore had no direct exposure to the subject, and knew little about it as such, though I picked up some understanding indirectly, for example, through Eliot, and through thinking about some of the issues raised by Judaism. But at about 14, my mother happened to pick up a copy of The Story of Philosophy by Will Durant, and suggested I might find it interesting. This history of philosophy is less well known than Bertrand Russell’s – but while the latter is dominated by Russell’s own philosophical commitments and prejudices, Durant’s work was a much better guide to a beginner like me. I was immediately intrigued by the text, as I had never previously come across philosophy proper. I was fascinated to discover that some major figures had radical views about all sorts of things, but mainly just by thinking hard about them, and asking questions that probably don’t even occur to most people. This seemed cool – and meant I didn’t have to learn loads of boring facts, do messy experiments, or struggle with puzzling equations, while at the same time I could argue with people, say all sorts of provocative things (‘Dad, God doesn’t exist!’), and feel less boringly conventional. It also meant that from the beginning, because of this book, my approach to philosophy was through its history, in trying to understand what all these strange people, including Aristotle, Spinoza and Kant, were saying and why. In fact, it was Spinoza who I found most fascinating from this reading, I guess because of his (problematic) relation to Judaism; and the Jewish tradition more broadly may have given me an attraction to the kind of interpretative approach it adopts towards the biblical texts, which for me then became replaced by philosophical texts instead.  But I never took my interest in Spinoza much further when I studied philosophy properly at university, as Kant and then Hegel took over. While still at school, I started to drop philosophical apercus into my essays and conversations, in a doubtless pretentious and unknowing way. And so, it all began…

What did your parents make of the interest in philosophy?

Mr Coleridge helped me persuade my parents that studying philosophy at university wasn’t a bad mistake. Not surprisingly, they were anxious that I should study a subject with clearer job prospects, such as law or economics. But Mr Coleridge reassured them that after taking a philosophy degree, I would doubtless move in a more conventional and worldly direction – little did they know.

Other extracurriculars?

I enjoyed painting as a teenager both inside and outside school. This mainly consisted of angst-ridden portraits in dark colours: I was a big Francis Bacon fan. I had to teach myself to paint, as my art teacher had also played cricket for Yorkshire, which meant he only studied art in the winter when they taught him drawing but not painting, so that was all he knew how to do. I also remember going on occasional cycle rides and walks through the countryside with other nerdy academic kids to smoke cigarettes in secret. And I wrote awful poetry. I would have loved to play a musical instrument, but unfortunately have always lacked the talent. As a pompous intellectual, I viewed sport with scorn, and stupidly didn’t learn to sail, which would have been easy and fun to do in Norfolk. So, through idleness, vanity, and perversity, I failed to acquire abilities in many things that I only later really wished I was able to do. However, even though this was also something I despised at school, I did start running in my 20s, when I was doing my PhD. The youngest of my brothers had taken up running in 1988, around the time of Bob Geldof’s 5K ‘Race Against Time’ – one of the first attempts to raise money for charity through sponsoring individuals. My brother suggested I should try that: I kept complaining I suffered from insomnia, and he sensibly pointed out that a bit of running might help by tiring me out physically, as I just spent all my time sitting at a desk. I started very slowly and miserably, but I was soon hooked. I later did a couple of marathons, and I still run regularly, even if now slowly, once again.

Were you interested in politics?

Typically enough, the politics of the public schools I went to was broadly Conservative, as the parents of most of the children were farmers, professionals, or business people, and so were pretty well-off. But my family was anomalous, having had working-class roots, as mentioned above. So even though they worked their way out from this, my father at least understood the difficulties of a poorer life and could see the appeal of a more socialist perspective. Though I think they may have changed their voting after I had grown up, my father regularly voted Labour when I was young, which had its influence on me. I can’t be so sure about my mother, who was definitely attracted more to Thatcherite Conservatism: Margaret Thatcher was just the kind of tough-minded, self-made woman that my mother admired. My mother’s brother was also a politically colourful uncle, who had moved from being a communist in his youth to becoming a Malthusian conservative in his middle age – so he was a constant source of provocative debates when we visited him. Nonetheless, despite these transitions in the family, when I was at school my upbringing meant that I was drawn more to Labour, and so would spout out various half-digested leftish statements, which during election time meant I was sometimes chased around by other kids – though to be fair, never in a very threatening way. I can’t say this family influence ever led me to then become a particularly active political person, but perhaps it did lead me to take an interest in political philosophy, and hence to my later work on figures such as Hegel, Marx, and the Critical Theorists.

Music?

My musical taste was mainstream. Even though punk emerged in my later teens, I was more a fan of obvious earlier bands like The Beatles, the Stones, Pink Floyd, and even Genesis – while like everyone else I was influenced by John Peel’s great radio programme, who as he lived fairly near Norwich was a local hero. As a result, I also listened to bands like Joy Division and Toots and the Maytals. But my real love was Bob Dylan, and he is still my favourite. I liked jazz of a fairly standard kind, such as John Coltrane, Miles Davis and Billie Holiday, but have never seriously engaged with classical music, perhaps because it didn’t form part of my upbringing.

Romance?

I knew a few girls. But my prep school was all boys, and Gresham’s only had a handful of girls, so I didn’t spend much time with them. At this stage romance was therefore all abstract, and I was naïve. At around 13 I received my first Valentine’s Day card. A group of girls had written one for me which had various suggestive jokes in it. My daughter recently found the card, long forgotten in an old trunk: I had corrected every single spelling and grammar mistake it contained, much to my daughter’s amusement. More priggishness, I am afraid.

Leisure?

My parents and I went to California several times, which in those days was unusual, but their closest friends had emigrated there in the 1970s. These trips were the highlight of my adolescence. To a young English child from a country still struggling with a post-war economic crisis, going to Los Angeles where these friends lived was like going to a kind of dream world: crazy amounts of food, long country drives in massive cars which often started with breakfast in a diner, and houses with their own swimming pools, not to mention Disneyland. Still, my father stubbornly stuck to vanilla when faced with 31 varieties of ice cream in Baskin Robbins. As tourists, we were protected from the darker side of political and social issues from which American suffered in its own way too.

But aside from these occasional moments of fantasticality, being a child and teenager in the UK mostly consisted in just hanging around with friends not doing much at all – as there were no computers, no internet, no mobile phones, no major accessible music scene where I lived, no exciting outdoor activities (except sailing which I ignored), and no specific entertainments aimed at teenagers. Moreover, the excitement of the hippy period had drifted away, and we were too early for the anarchy of the punks. I don’t remember feeling bored, though – I think we just had lower expectations!

Get in trouble?

Not a lot. At school, I was never appointed as a ‘Prefect’ (the pupil enforcers of the school rules) much less ‘Head of House’ (who ran the groups into which the school was divided up based on the different building in which people lived), or ‘Head Boy’. This was probably because teachers sensed an underlying contrariness in me which could cause them trouble. Ironically, the person who was appointed as a Head of House and later as Head Boy was John Lanchester, who is now widely known as a writer of both fiction and non-fiction, and a contributing editor of the London Review of Books. We have been friends from school onwards. John has always been more rebellious and adventurous than me, but at school he managed cleverly to appear a supporter of conventions and the authorities while also being an ally to those who questioned both. I think all I got into trouble for was smoking cigarettes – where bizarrely the punishment was for me to shovel coal in the school cellar from one place to another, which was doubtless even more unhealthy…

What did you worry about?

Like most of my generation, at one level I worried about the Cold War, and the possibility that this would lead to a nuclear disaster. We didn’t discuss it much, and I don’t even remember a huge amount of media coverage, but it was in the background, occasionally making its way into my nightmares. In addition, in the 1970s the UK had a series of strikes and economic crises, such as the ‘three-day week’ designed to conserve electricity; this was all rather unsettling. Nonetheless, at a more personal level, I was enormously fortunate to feel secure and pretty content – school was fine and being a ‘boarder’ meant I didn’t have to battle with my parents (in the way all good teenagers do), as I only saw them in the holidays during which we got on reasonably well. I had no real idea of how the rest of my life might go, but I don’t recall being that stressed about it, as I was too naïve to worry.

Outside nuclear Armageddon, any interest in politics?

My Jewish background meant we did get a fair bit of information about Israel, though of course from a Jewish perspective. I have only been to Israel once, when I was sent off by my family to a kibbutz in Ashkelon in summer 1980, just before I went to university. Looking back on it, that seems rather extraordinary, as I knew no one there, had virtually no way to communicate to home (remember, no internet!), and no experience of being abroad on my own outside Europe (I had spent a couple of weeks with a family in Paris, to help learn French, but that was all). All the same, I had a wonderful time (including an amazing week in Jerusalem). It seemed to me (naively) that I was visiting at a historically significant moment, when Israel was moving in a broadly liberal direction, after having successfully defended itself militarily, but still with some hope of achieving a reconciliation with its neighbours and overcoming internal divisions. Doubtless the vague Zionism I felt then now seems simplistic in the context of the much more complex and problematic situation that has developed since. Being youthful and mostly ignorant, I simply assumed that peace would come.

Where did you apply to college and why?

I applied to Cambridge University, choosing St John’s College. Both decisions were rather ill-informed and naïve, but worked out happily enough in the end. By this point, I was doing sufficiently well aged 17 for my school to encourage me to think about going on to Oxbridge (i.e. Oxford and Cambridge), of which I knew nothing. But I had decided I wanted to do philosophy – and so I decided against Oxford as they don’t offer straight philosophy degrees, instead combining it with other subjects, such as classics, or politics and economics (the well-known PPE). Of course, now I can see those options might have been exciting – but at the time I had no interest in doing anything other than just philosophy, which was possible at Cambridge and so seemed the much better choice. I wasn’t aware that in fact Oxford had a much bigger philosophy department (as it still does), and in fact the philosophy department in Cambridge was quite small (as it still is, in a way that puzzles me, as it could presumably be much bigger easily enough). Nor did I know anything about the lecturers there at the time, nor the tutors in the college system – and I was ignorant about the colleges themselves too. One of my teachers suggested that I opt for St John’s, I think because he had gone there himself. This turned out to be one of the larger colleges, at that time all male (again!), with beautiful buildings, decent food, a wonderful library, and swathes of land, while being very well located. Of all the three large colleges in the city centre, St John’s was rather less self-important than Trinity College while being less trendy than King’s. It thus turned out to fit me well, being a self-doubting nerd at the time.

I therefore took the entry exam and progressed to an interview with Renford Bambrough who was then the main philosopher in the college. He asked me about Spinoza because I foolishly declared that I had read some of his work. I did my best to concoct a reply, which must have made some kind of sense, as I was fortunate enough to be awarded a scholarship based on the interview and the exam. I found myself ten months later in an impressively large and stylish room in one of the newer college buildings (a perk for scholars, as well as a few formal meals and a book grant), starting to study philosophy in 1980 from virtually zero, aged 18.

Did you feel unprepared at St Johns?

Yes and no, I guess. On the one hand, as I have mentioned, no students had done philosophy at school, as in those days this was not an option. So, I didn’t feel that any of the other first years at Cambridge were ahead of me in that sense, as in effect we were all beginners who had stumbled into philosophy through various routes. On the other hand, precisely because of this, I had no substantive sense of how philosophy was done, or of the key issues, or even of the main thinkers except a few historical names that I happened to have stumbled upon. We also weren’t given the sort of general introductory teaching, which is more commonplace now, but were plunged into a series of topics, without much of an overview of how they connected. (My first essay, I think, concerned ‘On Denoting’ by Bertrand Russell – not exactly an introductory place to start.) But still, I suppose because we all felt we were in the same fog, I don’t remember panicking too quickly, but I just assumed that somehow I would get through this, as others had done previously.

It's not really classes at Cambridge, right? Enjoyable experience or…

That’s right, as the main structure for studying at Cambridge was a weekly, hour-long, one-to-one supervision (which I think it still is). You would spend 5 or 6 days wrestling with a reading list, and then stay up most of the night hand-writing an essay. The topics specified by the supervisors were meant to cover the set syllabus (which in the first year was metaphysics, ethics, philosophy of language, logic, and some set texts), but these were taught in terms of specific topics that might come up in the summer exams, rather than being connected together with an overview, so it all felt rather confusing and piecemeal. You would then attend the supervision, and, rather terrifyingly, read your work aloud to your supervisor, before receiving their comments and trying to hold your own in a discussion. Finally, you took away a new reading list for the following week. In the first year, my supervisors were all from St John’s. One was Renford Bambrough, who as the main Philosophy fellow at the college had interviewed me for my admission; he was greatly influenced by Wittgenstein, and fairly regularly mentioned him in the discussion though oddly we never looked at Wittgenstein’s texts themselves. Another supervisor (who I will not name) was more problematic, as he tended to fall asleep while I was reading my essay in his tiny, over-heated room at the top of one of the college towers. More than once after reading out my essay, I then sat uneasily in silence for what seemed an eternity, hoping he might wake up, and then crept out when he did not. Fortunately, after the first year, as your interests became more specialised, you moved on to supervisors in the field who came from other colleges, making the supervision more stimulating and interesting.

Lectures were connected indirectly to the syllabus and were entirely optional. I did attend these fairly regularly, especially in the third year when I began to appreciate the quality of what was on offer. But frequently the lecture rooms were pretty empty, and unless you met them in your own college, you also often didn’t get to know other students attending the lectures particularly well. Curiously, as I recall, the other philosopher who started off with me at St John’s, and those philosophy students from other colleges who I met in the first year who did become my friends, transferred out of the subject quite quickly, so I was left feeling that I was studying it on my own.

Inspirational lecturers?

When I arrived at Cambridge, the Philosophy department was in something of a transitional period, as well-known and influential academics like Bernard Williams and Ian Hacking had moved on (in Williams’s case as Provost of King’s College), while Elizabeth Anscombe was coming to the end of her career. As I remember it, Anscombe used to lecture at a demanding time (I think it was 9:00 am on a Monday morning – or perhaps Friday), and she made few concessions to her audience. It therefore seemed like her first year lectures on Plato’s Euthyphro simply endlessly repeated Socrates’s question: ‘Is the pious loved by gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?’; but her understanding of any possible answer remained opaque at the time, though I would be fascinated to hear her lectures now. The philosopher of logic, Casimir Lewy, was also near his retirement, and gave rather eccentric lectures, most of which were spent ranting critically and vociferously about his great rival P. F. Strawson in ways that again none of us were really capable of fathoming. There were several impressive younger academics who were establishing themselves, such as Jeremy Butterfield – but while I greatly enjoyed Jeremy’s lectures, his central focus on philosophy of science was sadly far from my own area of competence. Ross Harrison was also in the department, and I remember attending his lectures. Around this period he was publishing on transcendental arguments, which later became a topic of great interest to me. I am afraid I can’t recall if he was lecturing on this subject when I was a student, and so I don’t remember him as the source of inspiration. The most dominant figure at the time was Hugh Mellor. However, he had come to philosophy through a background in the sciences, which gave him a kind of antipathy to the history of philosophy. As he put his position to me at one point: why should a philosopher study the history of philosophy, any more than a scientist should study the history of science? So, of course, there was not going to be any meeting of minds there.

I would single out three particularly inspirational figures, one a college supervisor, and two lectures in the Philosophy department – namely Jorge Secada, Edward Craig, and Jonathan Lear.

Jorge Secada had a post-doctoral position at St John’s. He took on some teaching, primarily in the history of philosophy, so I had him as a supervisor for several years. He was an expert on Descartes and related figures. Jorge was full of energy and enthusiasm, and so would talk widely about all sorts of interests beyond my essay topics, which I found highly stimulating and engaging.

Unlike my meetings with Jorge, I first got to know Edward Craig and Jonathan Lear primarily through their lectures, though I was also supervised by Jonathan in the third year in his own college. At this time, Edward was working on topics that he later developed in his book The Mind of God and the Works of Man, which was published in 1987. This offers a highly distinctive and insightful account of the history of philosophy from Descartes onwards, including what was at that time a rather unusually sympathetic discussion of Hegel. His lectures in this area, on which his book was based, provided my first significant exposure to Hegel, and made a big impression.

Finally, during this period Jonathan Lear, after publishing largely in ancient philosophy, had become interested in Kant, on whom he had begun lecturing. This was also inspiring – he was an extremely animated and engaging lecturer, and doubtless would have enthused me with whatever he had chosen to teach. His interest in Kant did not last terribly long, as he began to develop his growing focus on psychoanalysis, but for my purposes I was fortunate to cross paths with him at that time.

How did your understanding of philosophy evolve?

Where I could, I selected history of philosophy courses, which became increasingly demanding. I also took courses on aesthetics (with Michael Tanner), and some in metaphysics, philosophy of language, ethics, and political philosophy. Having been traumatised by Casimir Lewy, I avoided logic. I was also able to attend lectures outside the department, such as those given in History by Quentin Skinner, Richard Tuck, and Duncan Forbes, and in Classics by Myles Burnyeat, all of which broadened my knowledge. In general, I gained a sense that the more you learn about one topic, the more you see how it fits with others. (To use Isaiah Berlin’s famous distinction which he derived from Archilochus, I aspired then, as I do now, to be a hedgehog who aims to draw everything together, rather than the fox who sees them as separate and distinct fields.) It is also worth noting that British philosophy in those days lacked the breadth that is available to students now, such as non-Western philosophy, feminism, or philosophy of race. In that respect, my sense of philosophy inevitably remained narrow for some time.

Favorite philosophers--living or dead-- at that point in your life?

As I have mentioned, from the start I was very intrigued by the history of philosophy, so most of my favourite philosophers at the time were dead – and all were white and male, in line with the accepted canon. Jonathan Lear and Edward Craig made me curious about Kant and Hegel – although I still remember the trauma of reading the Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit over the summer in preparation for Edward’s course. This seemed the natural place to start reading the book as it is the first section; but, unbeknownst to me at the time, it is famously difficult to understand. In fact, Hegel wrote the Preface after he had finished the main text, and crammed as much as he could into it because his publisher wouldn’t allow him more pages in the main text for his already over-long book. Furthermore, he deliberately made it obscure and demanding as he despised giving away everything about his ideas and arguments in a mere preface. As a result, I had no idea what he was talking about, however many times I read it through, which caused me to feel anxious over this course. However, in the event Edward sensibly skipped the Preface (which Hegel always wanted to be read at the end anyway), and got us going with the more intelligible Introduction instead, though even that is not exactly a doddle…

I also think that if he had been taught in Cambridge at the time, I might well have been drawn by Wittgenstein. Oddly enough, even though Wittgenstein had produced much of his key work in Cambridge, which was also the main place of his original influence from 1929 onwards, by the 1980s the situation was very different: when I arrived he was largely ignored and even rather despised, apart from by Renford Bambrough who took his thinking seriously, and Jonathan Lear who published a couple of papers in this period drawing on Wittgenstein. While Anscombe is closely associated with Wittgenstein, as I have said she was on the verge of retirement; and regrettably Adrian Moore had just left Cambridge for Oxford, so at the time I missed out learning from him about Wittgenstein too, though we have become good friends since. So when I read Wittgenstein, it was usually on my own in a rather furtive way, whereas if I had been in Oxford I would have found many people to talk to and several courses to attend, such as those run by David Pears and Peter Hacker. But then perhaps I would never have escaped becoming a Wittgensteinian, which on balance might have turned out to be unfortunate, who can say?

Amongst living philosophers, I dipped into work by most of the leading figures of the time from the UK and US, such as Bernard Williams, Derek Parfit, Michael Dummett, Thomas Nagel, Richard Rorty, and Donald Davidson. I suspect I didn’t understand any of them properly. I did hear Rorty and Davidson when they each gave papers in Cambridge, which were big events – but again, I can’t swear I fully understood those papers either. Looking back, it is also striking how geographically and culturally narrow our experience of modern philosophy was – some of us had picked up bits of Sartre, but that was about it. The general attitude to so-called ‘continental philosophy’ was later typified by Hugh Mellor’s vociferous objections to the proposal to offer Jacques Derrida an honorary Cambridge degree. He had been put forward by other departments including English, but not Philosophy. The protest failed.

What's wrong with being a Wittgensteinian?!

Well, as I said, it can be hard to be sure that this turn away from Wittgenstein has been for the best! But having moved on to Hegel instead, it is possible to see from that perspective how it may have been a kind of escape. Interestingly, in the 1960s and 70s there was a minor trend of interest in the potential connection between Hegel and Wittgenstein; but this has since petered out, perhaps because Wittgenstein is less dominant generally. For example, J. N. Findlay makes some significant references to Wittgenstein in his insightful commentary Hegel: A Re-Examination (1962). I agree with Findlay when he draws attention to the parallels between two comments that they make: Wittgenstein writes that ‘Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our understanding through the instruments of our speech’, while Hegel says that ‘The battle of Reason consists in this, to overcome the rigidity which the Understanding has brought it’ (cited by Findlay on p. 23). However, I think Findlay is also right to say that a difference still emerges between them: ‘Only while for Wittgenstein philosophical exaggerations disappear in this final orientation, and need not, except for a confusion, have emerged at all, for Hegel their emergence is essential to the final result, and is in some sense “preserved” in it’ (ibid.). Thus, on the one hand Hegel appears to take a Wittgensteinian ‘therapeutic’ approach when he writes that ‘The questions which philosophy fails to answer, are answered by seeing that they should not be so posed in the first place’. But on the other hand, for Hegel in order to see that these questions ‘should not be so posed’, we cannot do so by just returning to ‘ordinary language’ or some pre-philosophical standpoint, but instead by further philosophical thinking that takes us beyond the categories that come natural to our ordinary understanding. So, if Hegel turns out to be right, ultimately not being a Wittgensteinian represents a kind of escape after all.

Why does Hegel get a bad rap? What do you wish people understood about Hegel?

When it comes to Hegel’s ‘bad rap’, I assume you mean a dismissive attitude, rather than a substantively critical one. The latter is common in so-called ‘continental philosophy’ in which Hegel is often a target; but that still means taking Hegel very seriously, so that dismissivism as such is uncommon in this tradition. But while there has been a restoration of interest in Hegel in so-called ‘analytic philosophy’ in the UK and US from the 1970s, beginning with Charles Taylor’s book Hegel, nonetheless philosophers in this tradition seem able simply to ignore him. Seen historically, this is because the demise of British Idealism, to which Hegel’s own idealism was central, was followed by the logic and philosophy of language of Frege and Russell, by the rise of the Vienna Circle and of Pragmatism, as well as of the ordinary language philosophy of Wittgenstein, and so on. Much of this tradition was shaped initially by its rejection of British Idealism, claiming that instead it was based on new methods, different ambitions, and alternative intellectual affinities. As a result, the context needed in which to understand Hegel was lost, in a way that has never happened in ‘continental’ philosophy. Consequently, even while many scholars take Hegel more seriously than was once the case, many contemporary ‘analytic’ philosophers who work in the wake of these traditions are still able to simply ignore him, as none of them were shaped by his positive impact, in a way that is not true of the role of Leibniz, Kant, and Mill, for example.

However, gradually from around the 1970s onwards, in some quarters at least, the confidence in standard analytic philosophy began to come under question, leading to a greater diversity in views, and an interest in other ways of doing philosophy, including the ‘continental’ tradition, to which Hegel is not irrelevant but fundamental. As a result, figures such as Taylor, but also Richard Rorty, Alasdair MacIntyre, John McDowell, and Robert Brandom brought Hegel into their discussions, and started to treat him as a neglected option. That Hegel had been ignored began to be seen as a potential mistake. Whereas previously his ‘bad rap’ was that he seemed surpassed and irrelevant, this is now no longer taken to be the case.

But still, if Hegel deserves to be returned to his place in the tradition that he lost after the collapse of British Idealism and the rise of ‘analytic philosophy’, what can we learn by doing this: how might he help us where we are stuck today? The answer to this question, of course, depends on how one reads Hegel, for which there are various options. For myself, I would suggest that there is much to be learned from his claim regarding the dialectical relation between the categories of universality, particularity, and individuality, where instead we are frequently tempted to pull them apart. For example, it can easily be supposed that the interests of the individual are opposed to that of the community, or that objects are individuals distinct from the universal properties which belong to them, or that freedom for an individual must consist in the ability to exercise a choice that goes against following reasons that are universal. By contrast, Hegel argues that each requires the other, so that the individual is only who they are within a community, that individuals without properties are identical because they are deprived of what makes them distinct, and that choice is not a kind of freedom, but is instead a form of randomness which to be overcome requires a basis in universal reasons. In following Hegel’s often complex and subtle arguments on these sorts of issues, and so putting his account of these categories to work, we might be able to get beyond the one-sidedness of many apparent oppositions (such as that between the individual and the state), and reach a kind of depth and stability in our thinking that otherwise is lost (such as the endless debates between various forms of social individualism on the one hand and collectivism on the other). Such, I would suggest, is the promise of his dialectical thinking, though it remains to be seen if this promise can be delivered.

What is spirit, dude?

It may be worth beginning by commenting on the word ‘spirit’ itself. This is the term usually used to translate Hegel’s term ‘Geist’, and in English it immediately has the implication of something broadly religious, as in ‘holy spirit’, or ‘a spiritual life’. However, ‘Geist’ can also be translated as ‘mind’, as in ‘Geisteskrankheit’ which means ‘mental illness’. In addition, even when best translated as ‘spirit’ – for example ‘die Zeitgeist’ as ‘the spirit of the time’ – the sense of ‘spirit’ is again not necessarily religious, but more a kind of collective human subject. As a result, while the title of Phänomenologie des Geistes is most commonly translated as ‘Phenomenology of Spirit’, it has sometimes legitimately been translated as ‘Phenomenology of Mind’ instead. Thus, although several interpreters take Hegel’s talk of Geist to suggest a religious position, in my view this is much less clear, as often he is speaking of our mental capacities which operate on various levels (such as perception, understanding, and rationality) and which have developed over time (for example in moving from initially thinking of political freedom as applying to one, and then to many, and then to all).

One way to get at what Hegel means by it, is to note that he uses the terminology of Geist in the title of two texts. The first is the Phenomenology as I have mentioned, and the second is Die Philosophie des Geistes – which is more often translated as ‘Philosophy of Mind’, than of Spirit, again reflecting the dual sense of the term. Understanding the role of these texts can therefore shed light on Hegel’s understanding of Geist.

The Phenomenology is Hegel’s first mature writing and is so called because it presents the spirit or mind as a phenomenon (from the Greek ‘phainesthai’, which means ‘to appear’), in the sense that it takes our thinking through a variety of positions which represent only the appearance of true thought, but not its reality. As Hegel puts it in the Preface, ‘It is this becoming of science itself, or, of knowing, that is presented in this phenomenology of spirit as the first part of the system of science’. It is thus a phenomenology because it does not itself represent spirit or mind really grasping the world, but rather covers positions that appear to do so although in fact they do not.

One might wonder why this exercise is needed – why not jump straight to the truth? What is the point of a phenomenology of ultimately erroneous views of reality proposed by thinkers, which includes not just metaphysical errors, but also various ethical, political, and religious ones? Hegel’s answer, I think, is that the alternative approach is just a kind of dogmatism, where you assert the truth as you see it – but then find that others disagree. How is this disagreement then to be resolved? For Hegel, this can only happen in a non-dogmatic way by mind or spirit seeing for itself that its own position is in the end incoherent and therefore false, so it can then move on to a better view. Once this process has come to some form of stability, we are then ready to begin philosophy proper, which will set out in detail how reality is in a positive way, rather than negatively bringing out the problems with the positions that have been gone through in the mere phenomenology or appearance of Geist. In the book, this appearance is shown to take the form of various kinds of metaphysical thinking, but also conceptions of the human mind in a broadly collective sense, for example the thinking of the Enlightenment, or of the French Revolution. Proponents of these views all hold that they have reached a truth, where Hegel shows in their own terms that in fact they have not, as key forms of incoherence can be revealed to the proponents of them all.

Thus, once we have gone through this phenomenology, we are then ready to move on to ‘science itself’ – where the German term ‘Wissenschaft’ is much broader than merely natural science, as it includes any form of ordered and reflective thinking (as can be seen in English in the label of the philosophy society at Cambridge which I attended when I was there, namely ‘The Moral Sciences Club’). This scientific account is given in Hegel’s Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, which has three parts – a Logic, a Philosophy of Nature, and a Philosophy of Geist, which again can be translated as ‘mind’ or ‘spirit’. This is therefore the second main treatment of Geist after the Phenomenology. I will now briefly explain how it fits within the ‘philosophical sciences’ of the Encyclopedia.

As the first part of that science, the Logic sets out the fundamental categories or concepts which Hegel argues are needed to conceive of reality, of which the most fundamental categories turn out to be substance universals (such as ‘human being’), particular properties (such as ‘being male’), and individuality (such as me, Bob Stern). Hegel argues that these categories cannot be made sense of on their own, but that each requires the others in a dialectically interrelated way (so I can’t just be an individual without properties, for example). Hegel then moves on from his Logic to think first of all about the natural world based on these categories, which is structured in terms of physics, then chemistry, and then biology. Finally, he then moves on to his Philosophy of Geist, which starts from the simplest levels of mental faculties, and then takes this mentality to more sophisticated levels, where in this text he is once again using the philosophical insights gained from the Logic to argue for different ways of understanding the world of the mind. This includes not only how the mind works in terms of its perception, imagination, understanding, reasoning and so on, but also the mind at social, artistic, religious, and philosophical levels of thinking. Throughout this treatment of spirit or mind, Hegel again argues for a dialectical approach that treats the mind as holding together elements of universality, particularity, and individuality. For example, in the rational state a middle ground needs to be found between pure individuals who stand on their own, and a conception of the state in which this individuality is lost within a universal or general kind. In the end, therefore, Hegel’s conception of mind or spirit, like the rest of his philosophy, can be traced back to his treatment of these categories from the Logic.

Was there anything about philosophy you found distasteful?

From the start I was a bit of a philosophy junkie, and while I found that some of what we were being taught was puzzling, none of it put me off. What began to feel frustrating instead was a growing sense of the marginal place of philosophy more generally in UK culture – namely as an esoteric discipline with little practical or cultural significance. I came to realise that the last philosopher in the UK to be known and taken seriously by the wider community was Bertrand Russell, who had engaged with concrete issues as well as writing work that was seen as intellectually fundamental. However, since then, with the possible exception of some figures like A. J. Ayer and Bernard Williams, philosophy has become divided between purely academic work on the one hand, and ‘popularised’ philosophy on the other, so that philosophy itself has rather lost its social place, which is arguably a real problem to both sides. Even in ‘continental’ Europe and the US, with the obvious exception of Jürgen Habermas, there are arguably now no living philosophers with the wide public influence that the subject used to have through figures such as Sartre, de Beauvoir, Derrida, and Rorty. In this sense, then, it is arguable that philosophy has drifted away, partly due to its own fault and partly due to the fault of the wider culture.

What can philosophers do to become relevant to the public again?

That is a tricky question, and I am not sure I have an answer, as it partly depends on how one thinks the irrelevance has arisen in the first place. If it is just philosophy’s fault, perhaps we can fix it. However, I suspect the issue has a wider cultural grounding that we as philosophers cannot really control.

Looking at the problem historically, it may have this structure. In the pre-modern Christian world, religion was dominant with no separate role for philosophy; nonetheless, recognizable philosophical issues were widely raised in some traditions in a broadly theological context, where Scholasticism would be a prime example. Then in the early modern period, science now emerged as working independently of religion, and philosophy instead took up the role of being ‘handmaiden’ to science, to use John Locke’s famous phrase. However, currently on the one hand science increasingly sees no need for this assistance (think, for example, of Stephen Hawking’s contempt for philosophy); but on the other hand, philosophy cannot return to its relation to religion, as religion feels no need for it either. Philosophy can thus only make progress while working largely on its own. But then the result is that it becomes increasingly in-turned in a way that cuts it off from wider society, and thus makes it appear less and less relevant. As a result, the chance of philosophy catching the attention of the broader community drops away.

If my hypothesis is right, then there is perhaps little that we philosophers can do, until science or religion or both feel a need for us once more. I don’t think that is impossible – in fact, I think this need is very real on both sides. But I am a philosopher, so not the audience that needs to be convinced!

Worst part of the education you received at Cambridge?

There were both good and bad aspects to the way philosophy was covered and taught in this period (it may have changed at Cambridge now; I am not sure). On the positive side, we were plunged straight into serious material; through facing a different essay topic each week, we were required to absorb a lot very quickly; and we were taught by accomplished scholars who clearly engaged intellectually with the material themselves, often based on their current research. This made everything feel exciting and important. Nonetheless, there were also negative aspects. First of all, because of the college system, you often didn’t come across fellow students taking the same degree, nor meet students from other years. Oddly in retrospect, I only met most of the philosophers who overlapped with me at Cambridge, who are now friends, during our later philosophy careers, not when we were undergraduates. Among these are Sebastian Gardner and David Owens, while Stevie Makin became a close colleague at Sheffield though I had never met him when he was a post-doctoral research fellow in Cambridge.  Secondly, as it was such a small department, the topics covered were limited, and if I recall correctly, apart from Anscombe, all the lecturers were men. Finally, the assessment was particularly stressful, as while you took exams at the end of each year, in fact your final result was wholly dependent on the four or five days of exams at the end of the final year. This system rewarded certain skills but not others, and to me at least it was a grueling experience. Remembering this, I have always tried to minimise unseen exam assessment on courses that I have taught.

What were your philosophical weaknesses?

While I felt reasonably comfortable in the history of philosophy, I never felt quite at home in other fields, as my approach to systematic issues has always been to better understand them by putting the relevant thinking into an historical context. In areas treated ahistorically, you seemed to do best if you could come up with a clever quick argument for or against some position, in short exam answers – and I often lacked the confidence or ability to manage the kind of punchy response that was required. The only exception to this format was the ‘General Paper’ which I think was compulsory in the second and third years. For this exam, you had three hours to answer one question, which was usually presented in a single word or phrase, such as ‘Truth’ or ‘Beauty’ or ‘God’s Existence’. Here you could be more expansive – but you also ran the risk of whittering on in a structureless and self-important way that could easily end in disaster, making this stressful too.

If you could go back in time, and give yourself advice back then, what would it be?

I certainly wish I had taken up some of the external classes that were available, particularly in languages. I let my French collapse and I failed to learn German at this stage, only moving on to this when I was a PhD student, by which point I was under more time pressure. The three terms at Cambridge each year were very short (just eight weeks), so I could also easily have spent my summers visiting Germany for immersive study, which would have been of great benefit.

In college, what did you do to unwind?

Still being interested in art, I took on work in theatre design. This rather recklessly included creating a set of First World War battlefield trenches for R. C. Sherriff’s play Journey’s End at the University playhouse, the ADC. I was given a low budget – though thankfully I don’t recall any of the actors falling over the piles of gravel and mud with which I covered the stage.

I also became involved with a new student magazine called ‘The Heckler’, which was founded by Christopher Wade, who went on to occupy a high position in the British Council. Our aim was to be more socially critical and politically challenging than ‘Varsity’, which had been founded in 1947 and seemed to us to be rather institutional and mainstream. Instead, we wanted to provide an alternative voice and stir things up. I think ‘The Heckler’ made a bit of a splash, but it died after a few years, while ‘Varsity’ continues to go strong. Still, even if we were on the wrong side of history, the all-night sessions once a month (producing our magazine with glue and Letraset) were a lot of fun.

How did you grow as a person?

Like most university students, I learnt a lot from moving to a new city, leaving behind my family, and meeting a range of different people. Because of the way the Cambridge college system worked, I made some life-long friends in all sorts of other fields. This broadened my outlook, by giving me a wider context in which to try to fit philosophy.

Romance?

Yes, there was some… My first partner was one of the few female philosophy students, who I met fairly early on. We split up in the middle of the second year, but oddly enough, I remained friends with her grandmother until the end of her life. She was an interesting and lively character, an old-style socialist who was a pioneer in special needs teaching, focusing on reading problems. She lived in Cambridge throughout my time there and we met regularly. Then, as she came from Yorkshire, she later moved to Bradford just as I started at Sheffield, so I continued to visit her from there too.

My second and indeed final romance was when I went out with Crosby at the end of the second year. Meeting her was the greatest good fortune of my life. On paper we must have seemed like an unlikely match. She looked like a punk with a shaved head while I was the last aspiring hippy with long hair and flared jeans; she was a bright sociable historian and I was a somewhat nerdy aspiring philosopher; she would dance at every party and in every club, and I would stand in the corner smoking in a hopeless attempt to look mysterious and enigmatic. However, in the long run, it was certainly all meant to be.

Any major world events--scientific, political, technological, social changes or trends, etc.--that had a significant impact on your life and worldview during college?

My student period seemed politically fraught, though I suppose they usually are. Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister in the early 1980s. Her premiership loomed large at that time and remains a divisive influence even today. Social events in the UK included the Brixton and Toxteth Riots in which the black community clashed with the police, while in drama the influential TV series Boys from the Blackstuff highlighted the deprivation linked to the rise of Thatcherism. There were severe global famines, particularly in Africa, that received media attention; in response, public charity events, such as the appeals by Bob Geldof, were increasingly high profile. In addition, the AIDS health crisis was emerging, sparking a backlash of prejudice towards the gay community. In these ways, this period broadly foreshadowed many of the issues that we still face today. What make the two periods different is that in the 1980s some potential world disasters were not yet known, such as the climate crisis or global diseases such as COVID. The period was also different in other ways: for example, we had very little new technology (I remember seeing a computer in my final year, though I had no idea how to use it), and it seemed fine to smoke, even stylish.

Why should a philosopher study the history of philosophy? Like, should a scientist study the history of science? Was your interest in certain parts of the history of philosophy inspired by the philosophical issues discussed in those areas? If so, why not cut to the chase, and focus on contemporary discussions of those issues? Is the history higher quality philosophy? Is it that philosophers nowadays are not interested in the issues Hegel and Kant were interested in?

The twentieth-century American philosopher Burton Dreben is famously reported as saying to his graduate students that ‘Philosophy is garbage, but the history of garbage is scholarship’. The comment is then generally understood as vindicating the history of philosophy against the rubbish of philosophical reflection itself. If that is indeed Dreben’s point, I would not go that far, as I think there is much value in philosophical thinking. But nor would I go to the other extreme represented by Hugh Mellor, who as I have said, took that thinking to be as independent of its history as is the thinking of science, which can legitimately abandon most of whatever theorizing has gone on before.

I have five suggestions to offer in defense of my middle position on this debate. Firstly, whether philosophy is making ‘progress’ is less clear than it is in the sciences, so keeping some sense of other past options is a valuable exercise in case we then need to go back to them. Second, it may be harder to see errors in current thinking without keeping some of these past options alive. Thirdly, contemporary philosophy often claims great originality for its views, but they can in fact just be more feeble resurrections of past ideas to which it would be better to return. Fourthly, some views held currently were themselves undermined already in the past, where this refutation has been forgotten with that history (I fear much contemporary metaphysics, for example, illustrates the danger of such forgetfulness). Finally, reflecting on the past may allow us to distance ourselves from our own presuppositions and find a different perspective on our present practices.

Still, I think we should acknowledge that we philosophers who study its history do so in a different way from those who might be called ‘historians of ideas’, and who might then attack us from the opposite direction. For the historian of ideas may well have no commitment or interest in the truth or falsity of what they are examining as such, but instead wants to trace its historical impact, what made it novel, how it fitted into a wider cultural life, and so on. Seen from this perspective, the straight historian of philosophy will think that it is naïve to engage in that history not just to understand how thinking worked in the past, but also in order to ultimately find a way of conceiving the truth that is different from the conceptions that are currently dominant. Nonetheless, precisely this interest in the history of philosophy as one route to get closer to the truth is what in the end makes us philosophers rather than historians. And what makes this route viable for us is the fact that just like Hegel and Kant (for example), we are still interested in, and haven’t put to rest, such issues as what freedom consists in, or the meaning and possibility of happiness, or what the good requires of us.

What was your PhD experience like? Who did you work with? What was the dissertation on? Was writing the dissertation challenging?

The transition to the PhD in 1983 was a little tricky. In those days there was no MA year to smooth the transition from BA to PhD, which can also broaden your expertise. Instead, I found myself thrown straight into the PhD and so on my own, as there were no other graduates at Cambridge with my sort of interests. In retrospect, it would have been much more sensible to go somewhere else – but at that time it was harder to get information on other departments, while the pressure of the final year made it difficult to think about future plans, so I just stayed put.

Who was your supervisor?

I started with Jonathan Lear as my supervisor because my initial idea was to write on Kant; but my plan was not much more detailed or advanced than that, as it was then possible to get PhD funding with a vague proposal. While I enjoyed the start with Jonathan, he went back to the US fairly quickly, so I then moved on to Gerd Buchdahl who was in the History and Philosophy Science department. He was an interesting character to engage with, and had a deep love of Kant. But I think because he was nearing retirement, I was then finally moved on to Edward Craig, I believe for the last 18 months or so. As my research had progressed, I had become much more interested in Hegel. I read him initially just because I knew that he had a critique of Kant’s transcendental idealism, so I thought looking into that might be helpful. But the more I read Hegel, the more convinced I was that his critique is right, so the debate between these two German idealists became my central focus. I think both Gerd and Edward would be willing to allow that while they had each written briefly on Hegel, he was not their main research focus, so they largely just let me get on with it, offering thoughtful responses to my work as it went along.

Beyond that, I had little contact with other staff or students, and spent most of my work time sitting on my own in a small flat trying to make sense of what I was reading. One upside of this was that I had few distractions and finished the thesis inside three years. I was very lucky that Stephen Houlgate arrived as a post-graduate in Cambridge towards the end of my PhD studies. Stephen kindly took me to Oxford for my first conference of the Hegel Society of Great Britain which had been launched a few years previously. This was a significant experience for me at the time, as it was my first encounter with the wider Hegel community. It is a conference I have since attended regularly, and Stephen and I have remained friends. Though we don’t agree about everything, he is probably my closet Hegel ally. While I had started reading literature on Hegel in German, it wasn’t until a couple of years after I finished my PhD and gave a paper in Berlin that I met scholars there. I think I was the only British speaker, and as a junior figure, I was scheduled to give my talk at 9:00 am on the last day, so unsurprisingly the audience was minimal. But thankfully it was chaired by Jens Brockmeier, who was very kind to me: although his academic interests have taken a different direction since then, he helped encourage me to believe that my work in this area might work out.

Were you encouraged to publish?

Not particularly as a PhD student. But in those days this was normal, partly because there was less focus on publishing, and partly because I completed my PhD quickly, so it was hard to find the time to develop publications. My first printed work therefore only appeared in 1989 during my post-doctoral period, beginning with a couple of papers (one in Ratio, then edited by Edward Craig). The book based on my thesis appeared in 1990. My PhD examiners, Michael Inwood and Michael Rosen, had been kindly encouraging to get it published. My only regret is that while I wanted to call it ‘The Unity of Things’, Routledge insisted that it have Hegel’s and Kant’s names in the title, so I came up with the much less intriguing and almost meaningless title ‘Hegel, Kant, and the Structure of the Object’. I gain some minor satisfaction from being allowed to change the title back in a recent translation into Farsi.

What was the goal? Where did you want to end up, and what did you want to work on after you were done with the dissertation?

I had some ideas, but not goals, as I didn’t expect any of them to come off, for various reasons. First, at the time my philosophical concerns were a weird minority interest in the discipline. Second, the general economic situation in the UK was very problematic, including in the academic world. Third, compared to now, we were given no serious academic career advice by our supervisors or the wider department. So overall, while I knew such jobs existed, and while I saw the appeal in having one, I didn’t have much of an idea of how this could be achieved, nor did I have any serious expectation that it would happen. Rather, I assumed that I might manage to finish the PhD, and then probably end up having to do something else – but I would just do one thing at a time.

How did you secure the fellowship at St John's?

Even to this day, I have no real idea how it worked out! After I was finishing my PhD, Edward Craig was fortunately going on research leave for the year, and he kindly secured me a role as his replacement in his college, which was Churchill; so I then got paid to cover his administrative task of organizing the teaching for the students in the college, while I was also paid for the teaching I could handle myself. This was a fun year, and I liked being in Churchill, which as the name suggests was a modern institution, which had its own socially progressive politics. While I was there, Edward then encouraged me to apply to one of the colleges in the annual competition scheme for a Junior Research Fellowship, which paid you for the three years to develop your research projects, competing against applicants from all sorts of disciplines. I put in my application to St John’s as it was my college previously, but with zero hope of success, given my curious research topic and anonymous role when a graduate, with no exciting achievements to speak of – but for some mysterious reason I was successful.

Once I had the Fellowship, I was then more integrated into the Cambridge philosophy community, which included giving a paper to the Moral Sciences Club and presenting a short lecture course on Hegel. Around this time I got to know Tim Crane, and also Angie Hobbs, who co-incidentally was a schoolmate of my wife’s, and then who went on to become a close colleague in Sheffield. Amongst lecturers, Sue James and Jane Heal both arrived during this period, and we have kept up our contact, most recently through the British Academy. I also did more college teaching as a Fellow, and as a result I met Fraser Macbride when he was an undergraduate. We have remained friends, frequently discussing shared interests in the history of philosophy. I also very briefly supervised Rob Hopkins on Nietzsche, and we got on well. After his graduate studies he first went on to a post at Birmingham, and then moved to Sheffield where we were colleagues for around 10 years, before he went to NYU in the US.

Did you have to interview for the position at Sheffield? What was the job market like then?

At the time in the late 1980s, there had been a job crisis in universities, including in philosophy. So, although I had managed to get a research fellowship at St John’s, the future looked gloomy, and I was still fully conscious that I might need to find a different non-academic position, though had no idea what it could be. However, when I was in the second year of my fellowship, a post at Sheffield came up. In fact, though we weren’t really aware of it at the time, universities were just beginning a period of expansion, as more students were being accepted; but when I made my application, it was one of very few philosophy positions available in the UK.

So, when the Sheffield lectureship was advertised, it was suggested by Edward Craig that I should apply. As was typical at the time, no one gave me any training or advice on how to handle an academic interview, and I had no knowledge of Sheffield as a city, nor of the department itself. But compared to the ordeal that academic job applications are today, the whole event was low key and undemanding. The meeting lasted only about 30 minutes with David Bell and John Skorupksi, and I think Andrew Gamble from Politics: so no job talk, no writing sample, no elaborate application. Even so, I very nearly messed it up, as no one had advised me what an academic job interview might be like. As a result, while I knew about my research, I had given no thought at all to questions concerning teaching or an administrative role. I was being considered as the replacement for Frank McDermott, who taught political philosophy. The only political philosophy I knew was based on distant memories from undergraduate courses and what I had picked up from Hegel, though this was not my focus on his work at the time. I also hadn’t thought at all about how to run a full course, and my only significant teaching experience was in one-to-one supervisions. So, in response to that question in the interview, I just made something up on the spot about what I would teach and why. I therefore came out of the interview certain I had blown it, and went home feeling depressed.

However, overnight I thought I had nothing to lose if I rang David Bell back, to apologise for my mistake, and attempt to give a better answer… Luckily ‘Skorupski’ is an obscure name, so I got his phone number from directory inquiries and he gave me David’s number, and I said my thing. David listened politely and in silence, and then hung up. A few hours later, to my amazement, I was offered the job, which I accepted immediately… I have no idea if my telephone call was relevant at all, or even perhaps nearly blew my chances. It was never mentioned again. I got my extremely lucky break. I have felt a deep sense of gratitude to Sheffield University ever since, and so have never really treated leaving the department as a serious option – though another reason to stay is that in addition I have also always had excellent colleagues and students here.

You've been at Sheffield for over 30 years now. How has technology changed philosophy? Students? How has it changed the way you do philosophy? How have the methods and goals of philosophy changed? How have you evolved as a philosopher?

Technology has certainly changed the way we do philosophy, and how it is taught. It is less clear to me that it has changed philosophy itself, except obviously in the case of so-called ‘experimental philosophy’ (though I confess I know very little about that field). Maybe I am antiquated, but it also seems to me that the goals of philosophy have stayed much the same – namely in its own peculiar way, to make some sense of the weird world in which we live.

In terms of how we do philosophy, in my case technology plays a crucial role in research, where now various archives are available online, as are most primary and secondary texts. All of this makes this sort of research quicker and more thorough, giving us a chance to search texts in a detailed way. Other disciplines like History and English in addition use technology to produce various kinds of research data, such as the use and development of key concepts in texts, as well as developments in an author’s interests and styles; but this is less common in philosophy. At one stage I wanted to try this technique in relation to Martin Luther, as a way to track the changes in his ideas and how he was influenced by others, but unfortunately, I never had the time to take this any further. But I imagine at some point this sort of approach will become as common in the history of philosophy as it is elsewhere. And of course, particularly with the impact of COVID, we have now all become sophisticated at doing research events and meetings online instead of meeting in person. While this has obvious costs, it also has benefits, not least in reducing the environmental impact of travel and making it possible to fit in more of these meetings without the time it takes to get to them.

When it comes to technology in teaching, we have obviously all learned to use various kinds of online presentations and forms of discussion to run lectures and seminars (which again during COVID became the norm). I can’t claim to be at the cutting edge of this, and I do partly miss the old-fashioned paper handout, but I can see that overall, this has been a positive development, and can often be fun. Nonetheless, as the COVID experience also taught us, I think, meeting in person is invaluable for a satisfactory teaching relationship.

Finally, regarding my own evolution, technology has undoubtedly made it possible to expand my intellectual community, which now stretches across many countries, in contrast to my own experience as a graduate which was pretty much confined to the UK. And as mentioned above, technology has fed into my capacities for historical research, as well as helping me with translation issues. It is hard to know whether this has had an impact on the evolution of my philosophical views themselves, as history of philosophy was obviously possible before the development of these technologies. But without them, my work may well have been less exposed to helpful critical debate and discussion.

You are still with Crosby, yes? How did y'all manage the two-body problem? 

Yes, we sure are still together! We didn’t ever face the university version of that two-body problem, as Crosby was advised by her supervisors that because academic jobs were so limited, it would be wiser to do something else (advice I rashly ignored). So she first took training based in London to become a textile conservator, and then got a position at wonderful Blickling Hall in Norfolk, run by the National Trust. As I was still in Cambridge, we bought a small house in Norwich that was between our work venues, so I found myself back in my home city. However, once I got my job at Sheffield, Crosby moved with me and continued to work as a textile conservator, while she did a PhD at Sheffield University on the nineteenth-century Rifle Brigade. She was then appointed Curator of Art for the north by English Heritage, based at Brodsworth Hall near Doncaster. Since then, her interests have developed in a more academic direction, particularly after she was seconded to Bolsover Castle in Derbyshire. This stunning building is something of a mystery. She has based some increasingly discussed research on exploring its connection to the playwright Ben Jonson. It was also one of the homes of the author and philosophical writer Duchess Margaret Cavendish, so at last some of my knowledge has become vaguely relevant to her on occasion.

You’ve lately been doing a lot of work on Løgstrup? Seriously, why have I never heard of this person? I am embarrassed.

I originally came across Løgstrup by accident, so your lack of awareness of his work is far from uncommon. From 2001-2012 I was editor of the European Journal of Philosophy. This has organised a prestigious annual lecture since 2004, which is now known at the Mark Sacks Lecture, named in tribute to and memory of the journal’s founding editor – a close friend. In 2009, Alasdair MacIntyre gave the invited lecture, which was entitled ‘Danish Ethical Demands and French Common Goods: Two Moral Philosophies’. The first part of the title is a reference to Løgstrup, as the Danish author of the book The Ethical Demand. I had never come across Løgstrup at the time, but as editor of the EJP I felt I ought to do a bit of research on his work, so I would understand MacIntyre’s paper, and be able to discuss it a little in the seminar with him which followed. So, I gave The Ethical Demand a superficial read, and found I quite enjoyed it (in the English sense of ‘quite’), though I didn’t experience an instant revelation and conversion. Nonetheless, after the EJP event I found myself coming back to the text, and decided to apply for research funding to look into it more deeply, which I was then able to do over the next few years, eventually leading to my book The Radical Demand in Løgstrup’s Ethics. I was lucky enough to be greatly helped by Danish scholars on Løgstrup, particularly Hans Fink (who had also attended MacIntyre’s lecture and seminar, and had introduced him to Løgstrup in the first place), Kees van Kooten Niekerk, and Bjørn Rabjerg.

Nonetheless, as you say, Løgstrup is indeed little known in the English-speaking world, though that is beginning to change, partly through translations of four of his books (including his main text The Ethical Demand) which have been published recently by Oxford University Press. Two of the reasons for this lack of impact are that his academic position was in the Theology department at Aarhus rather than in Philosophy, and that he naturally published in Danish which was then largely untranslated into English (though it was quite extensively translated into German, largely by his wife Rosalie Maria Pauly, a German fellow student who he first met during their time at Freiburg before WWII). But more interestingly, I think a deeper reason for this neglect is that Løgstrup was out of step with the ethics of his time in the 1950s and 60s, while he is in fact closer to our thinking today, for example in his rejection of what was then the widely assumed ‘fact/value’ distinction. I am thus hopeful that his time will shortly come.

As for Løgstrup’s views, what particularly interested me about his writings is that he seemed to resolve the aporia in ethics that I had put forward in my previous book Understanding Moral Obligation: Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard. On reading his work, Løgstrup now struck me as an additional fourth figure who conceives of ethics in a way that gets over the difficulties faced by those other three. For, unlike them, he explains our ethical obligations to others without any appeal to the authority of reason (cf. Kant), interpersonal authority (cf. Hegel), or divine authority (cf. Kierkegaard). Instead, he argues that we are required to act simply by virtue of having power over other people, which makes them vulnerable to us and so requires us to respond to them with care or love. But then, in an intriguing twist, he argues that if we do really respond to others with love, we do not in fact respond to an obligation, as love for another is not possible when obligation is its basis. (Think of the difference between loving your children and loving them because you feel obliged to do so, where arguably you then do not actually love them at all.)

I dig it.

Løgstrup’s book thus begins by reflecting on the commandment to ‘love thy neighbour’ and develops an account of what such love is and requires in the form of his account of this ethical demand, which is said to be silent, radical, one-sided, and unfulfillable. Firstly, the demand is silent because you cannot just do what the other person asks of you and cannot just follow social norms or rules; instead, you must reflect on what is best for the other person and take responsibility for the actions that follow. Secondly, the demand is radical because the other person has no right to make the demand, while it requires you to act selflessly and perhaps against your own interests, though it should not be thought of as ‘limitless’. Thirdly, the demand is one-sided because you cannot demand something in return for the care you give to the other as a recompense or payback, meaning it is non-reciprocal in this sense. And finally, the demand is unfulfillable because in so far as you feel that care for the other is a demand or obligation, you have already failed in the love for the other that such care truly involves, for acting out of love is not to act out of any such sense of duty or obligation, as mentioned above.

Løgstrup argues that to make sense of a demand of this sort, we must see love as not something we can bring about in ourselves, but as a gift or what is given, for which we therefore cannot claim any reward, which is why the demand is one-sided. But on the other hand, we must also accept that our failure to love is our fault, as otherwise we could not be under a demand that cannot be fulfilled. Thus, none of his picture of the content and nature of ethics requires a theological basis. Nonetheless, in a culminating twist, Løgstrup argues that if we then seek forgiveness for this failure, Løgstrup finally allows a role for God – for as we are all equally at fault, we have all lost the standing to forgive each other, so this forgiveness requires us to look beyond the human. He thus introduces a distinctive ontology and anthropology to go with his ethics, and thereby offers us a radical contribution to modern ethical thought.

Interesting! So, can you explain in detail how his views relate to better known ethical theories, like Kantianism, Utilitarianism, and Virtue Theory?

I would suggest that Løgstrup’s position combines elements from these three position of virtue ethics, Kantianism, and utilitarianism, but in a manner that also distances him from each. On the positive side, virtue ethicists often make close attention to the details of the ethical situation into a distinctive element of their position, which could be considered a form of insight, while a Kantian might take the principle of universalisability as a way to put oneself in the other’s shoes, and the utilitarian will treat making their life successful as central to ethics. But while this may be common ground between these positions and Løgstrup, significant differences remain. For, the virtue ethicist will characterise our capacity for ethical insight as involving a training whereby we can make ourselves virtuous in a way that Løgstrup would reject, as it would in fact replace the humility of love with the arrogance of self-improvement. He would also deny against Kantianism that any rational principle like universalisability can substitute for imaginative identification with others and their needs. And finally, he would deny that a successful life can be understood just in terms of the sort of happiness or desire satisfaction made central by many forms of utilitarianism. Løgstrup’s position thus retains a combination of elements that makes it distinctively his own.

You have two kids, yes? How does that influence your philosophical thinking? Does your philosophical thinking influence your parenting?

That is right, I have two kids. My son Adam is now 27, and my daughter Lucy is 22. I have learnt quite a lot of philosophy from them, but in an indirect way. When we were expecting children, I think we assumed that they would be broadly just junior versions of us, with similar interests, commitments, ambitions and so on. But in fact, they are both very different from us, and also from each other. Adam is now a paramedic and he has always had a scientific and empirical view of the world, for which philosophy is a pretty pointless indulgence. Lucy has more sympathy with philosophy having studied it as school, and she is now starting a career in law, which has plenty of crossovers with philosophy. At the same time, she is also something of a fashionista who sometimes despairs at our rather mundane and boring style! These differences can create some lack of understanding between us all, but still on balance Crosby and I have learnt much more from them both than if we had all just been the same. And in different ways they have brought up interesting philosophical challenges. For example: in the end, how much does philosophy really matter compared to medicine, and isn’t the beautiful more admirable than the mundane? I think I have developed answers to both questions – but through posing them to me in their individual ways, I may well have learnt more from the kids than they have ever learnt from me.

How have political events over the last 30 years influenced your philosophical thinking?

It is hard not to be pessimistic with the way things have gone, in terms of climate change, the politics of Russia and China, Trump’s place in US history, Brexit, gender and racial disputes, and so on. Political philosophy itself has shifted from the dominance of Rawls when I started out, to which the only alternative seemed to be G. A. Cohen’s form of analytic Marxism. Now the scene is much more diverse, which includes the broad Marxism of Martin Hägglund, that strikes me as a very interesting development, drawing not only on Marx but also Hegel read in a strongly ‘left Hegelian’ way. When it comes to my own thinking, I haven’t got much beyond soggy liberalism – though weirdly with the rise of the political Right, this can now appear highly contentious and a target of abuse, rather than the banal common sense it once seemed. I haven’t myself published much on political issues directly, though recently I did give a talk exploring how far Hegel’s account of monarchy can explain the relative popularity of Elizabeth II in the UK, where her strange combination of authority at one level and powerlessness at another can arguably be related to Hegel’s model of the monarch within the modern state.

Tell me three things you have accomplished at Sheffield that you are most proud of and explain why!

At a research level, I think my contribution has been to start off new debates and areas of attention, rather than to settle philosophical issues once and for all – which in fact very rarely happens anyway. (People just get bored and move on.) When I started publishing on Hegel in 1990, I was part of what was then a small group who increased interest in his work at least in the English-speaking world, though other figures like Robert Pippin and Terry Pinkard are doubtless more influential. But their work was published after I had formed my views, and so I have taken a different direction, which at least keeps debate alive. Putting it simply (and a little crudely), Pippin and Pinkard see Hegel as still working within a broadly Kantian tradition, whereas I suggest that an important but subtle taking up of Aristotle make him fundamentally anti-Kantian, returning idealism to its Greek form and away from its Kantian one. More recently, I am in a similar way proud of my work on Løgstrup, where I hope to have opened up a new field of historical and systematic interest in his distinctive ethics.

When it comes to teaching, I feel happy that I have managed to keep German Idealism and more recently Løgstrup on the departmental syllabus at Sheffield, enabling several generations of undergraduates to discover these areas of philosophy. I also feel great nachas (to use the distinctive Yiddish term for a kind of proud pleasure) in the work of my graduate students, most of whom have gone into successful academic careers, while those who have chosen other careers have also done very well. Many have remained close friends ever since their time at Sheffield (and one of them, Chris Bennett, just completed four years as my Head of Department!), which is a great pleasure.

Finally, I have done a lot of academic administration here, including four years as Head of Department. This has always felt more of a duty than a pleasure – which is one area where I think Kant is right. In my experience those who get a buzz out of this sort of role quickly become power-crazed. Nonetheless, in retrospect I am glad that I did my bit to sustain the department’s growing reputation.

Are you a religious person? Why or why not?

As you may have noticed, religious issues play a significant role in my thinking about the history of philosophy, such as Løgstrup’s relation to religion, as well as that relation in Kant, Hegel, and Kierkegaard. I had also hoped to develop further research on Luther’s connection to the philosophical tradition, though this now seems unlikely. Although it is often neglected in contemporary treatments of these philosophers, I can see how much religious concerns have shaped their thinking – when until about the 1920s, almost every philosopher had some kind of religious faith. Moreover, in its own terms, religion can indeed be philosophically fascinating, giving rise to important problems and suggesting solutions that require a religious context to be understood. So as a historian of philosophy, research on religious thinking has seemed increasingly relevant given developments in my work and interests.

None of this has shifted my own personal relation to religion, though. From about age 14 I have remained broadly sceptical. This is not because I have novel and deep worries about religion or the religious, but more because I have a sense that, at the end of the day, I have no idea what religion in fact involves, as I have no idea what is ultimately meant by the talk of God and the divine. Views on this seem to run across such a range of options that it is hard to pin down what is meant by these concepts. At one extreme, God is held to be a kind of exemplary agent with various types of cosmic powers and perfect capacities, while at the other extreme the divine is treated just as a way to characterise reality as involving some form of transcendence, and so as not merely natural. Of course, one can engage with the debates between the proponents of these options and the various ones in between – but for me, once the issues become this broad, they seem vacuous and intrinsically unresolvable, and leave me wondering whether in fact no one really knows what they are talking about. At that point, it strikes me as more sensible to just walk away. I can imagine that some kind of religious experience might shift my thinking, but that has not yet happened so my attitude remains a form of unbelieving.

I get it. Which contemporary living philosophers do you most admire?

I have great admiration for many who work in my various fields, several of whom are close colleagues or friends, and whom would be too many to name here. While historically there have been famous fallings-out in philosophy (such as Schopenhauer’s loathing of Hegel, for example), that has never been my personal experience, even in cases where there are significant intellectual disagreements. Beyond those I know personally whose work has impressed me greatly (even if I don’t always agree), I would include Christine Korsgaard, Jürgen Habermas, Thomas Nagel, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Martha Nussbaum.

In general, what do you love about philosophy today? Hate?

In terms of what I love about contemporary philosophy, I think there has been a great growth of interest in the history of philosophy since the 1960s, which now has more depth and breadth. The traditional ‘Plato to NATO’ list of figures, such as those I first discovered in Will Durant’s list, is now much more diverse, in terms of age, gender, class, geographical location and academic style.

On the other end, while I don’t think I would ever use the strong term ‘hate’, I do sometimes worry that the changing employment structure of philosophy as an academic discipline is rushing people into publication too early and too quickly. The result is that in some respects quantity is outdoing quality, and often intelligent scholars are producing rather superficial contributions to somewhat minor debates. It is difficult to see how this pressure can now be changed or escaped, but it does make me feel sorry for more junior colleagues who experience considerable stress.

Advice for people at university?

I suspect that the university world is now so different that any advice I could offer from my experience some 40 years ago would be rather useless. As I have said, we lived in a world with no internet, so everything had to be done by reading actual books and articles, by contacting people sending letters (I wrote a letter to George Steiner objecting to his book on tragedy, to which he very kindly replied with a type-written response, which I still possess), and by travelling around if we wanted to see them, and so on. By contrast, of course, it is now possible to quickly know about and interact personally with the philosophy community across several countries, not just one’s own university. This is clearly a great advantage and opens up opportunities we didn’t really have. I think given how technology has moved on, and the expanded curriculum that is available, my advice would be to take advantage of this wider intellectual world, which was not really an option for us.

If you had to guess, what will philosophers be talking about, or not talking about, in 2050? What role does philosophy play in the world in the future? Will the problems of philosophy ever be solved? Can they be solved?

I imagine that two areas will be of increasing interest because of their wider significance, namely climate change and AI. Gender issues may well also remain central, though one might hope that some way to settle this debate can be found, or at least that some of the heat surrounding it will be reduced. To the extent that more traditional philosophical issues relate to fundamentals of the human condition, I doubt that they will be resolved if that means being ended once and for all. However, that is arguably philosophy’s great strength rather than it weakness – testimony to its centrality in our lives. This does not mean that new options will not arise, in a way that has often been fruitful in the past. Nonetheless, any grandiose claims that these new options can settle things once and for all (as was claimed for logical positivism, or pragmatism, or even German Idealism) are probably premature and doomed to failure.

Weird question: How does doing philosophy make you feel?

Most days, doing it makes me feel happily absorbed and engaged, though of course it can also be challenging, frustrating, puzzling, and demanding. As well as expanding my cultural knowledge and experience and teaching me much about the past as well as about present ideas, my enjoyment of philosophy also comes from its creative aspects, in terms of thinking, and also writing, arguing, structuring, imagining and so on. Sadly, I am unable to perform music, be a creative writer or artist, or conceive of some new scientific theory – but at its best moments, I think doing philosophy can come close to the various satisfactions to be found in these inventive activities, even all of them at once on a good day.

Favorite books (fiction)?

As well as all the usual favourites, I have recently discovered Marilynne Robinson, the US novelist who also writes some interesting non-fiction. I particularly admire her Gilead series, four novels focused on the same family from different angles. Her writing is beautiful and absorbing, and her books also explore themes that are of particular interest to me – in part inspired by her own Calvinism. Another author I am drawn to is the Norwegian Karl Ove Knausgaard, particularly his series of novels My Struggle. His writing is equally distinctive and absorbing, though in a very different way – earthly and every-day in contrast to the way that Robinson’s style is poetic and sublime. Like her, Knausgaard also has fundamental underlying philosophical and even religious concerns, focused on his treatment of Hitler and Nazism, and what this tells us about human evil – and indeed whether there even is such a fundamental phenomenon in the end. Thirdly, while I like much of his other work too, Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road is one that I find particularly significant. Like all his novels, it is written in its own distinctive style, while raising philosophical issues concerning hope, asking if at some point this must give way to despair. Finally, Iris Murdoch has become a particular source of pleasure. I first tried reading one of her fictional works in my 20s, and found it rather unappealing, set in a world very different from my modern times and written in a pompous and quirky style. However, more recently I have become very interested in her philosophical writing, particularly the essays in The Sovereignty of the Good. This led me to give her fiction another try. I then found it much more approachable and quietly experimental, and I was able better to appreciate some of the underlying philosophical themes. I think I have read about 10 of her novels, so have only 15 or so more to go…

Love The Road. See any good movies lately?

Like you, I was also impressed by the film version of that novel. More recently, I have seen several enjoyable movies. The Banshees of Inisherin is probably my favourite, with its quirky style and great acting. And I am just back from seeing Oppenheimer, which I found very compelling and absorbing. It also brought back some childhood memories, as at that point the threat of post-WWII nuclear war still seemed very real. Oddly enough, at the other end of the scale, despite its reputation I would judge the Oscar winner Everything Everywhere All at Once unwatchable. To me it felt more like a tedious computer game than an actual film. The best drama I have seen lately is in fact a play, Standing at the Sky’s Edge, a clever, creative musical set in a famous block of flats in Sheffield, taken through three generations. It rightly had outstanding reviews and transferred from the Crucible in Sheffield to the National Theatre in London.

Favorite TV shows of all time?

I often go for crime dramas and shows with a social or political edge. I was very gripped by The Wire and Breaking Bad, and Top Boy, made in the UK, and I loved Happy Valley which is set in Yorkshire and stars the hugely talented Sarah Lancashire. I also thought It’s a Sin was brilliant – the show powerfully and sympathetically covers lives in the gay community during the early years of the HIV/AIDS crisis in London. Derry Girls is a firm favourite too. It is a touching and very funny story about a group of schoolfriends, set during the Troubles in Northern Ireland in the 1990s. Gentleman Jack was very watchable – it portrays the nineteenth century industrialist and lesbian Anne Lister, brilliantly played by Suranne Jones, and it has outstanding costumes and period sets.

I watched quite a lot of TV with our kids when they were young, and I have happy memories of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (which Jenny Saul rightly recommended to me when we were searching for a positive female role model for my pre-teen daughter), Miranda, and Black Adder.

Finally, while there is a fair bit of philosophy on the radio in the UK (particularly In Our Time, which I had the pleasure of contributing to on a couple of occasions), the only philosophy programme on TV I can remember was the series Men of Ideas, shown in 1978. It is dated, as the title alone indicates (Iris Murdoch was the only woman interviewed), not to mention its rather pompous interview style. Nonetheless, it was one of my first encounters with philosophy and it made a deep impression on me. It is a pity that another more modern and contemporary version (with a different title!) has not been attempted.

Music?

As mentioned above, Bob Dylan is the musician to whom I am most attracted, and amongst his many great songs, ‘Blind Willie McTell’ is a favourite. (As an aside, some may be interested to know about this book on Dylan edited by two philosophers, which contains essays from several more). Amongst more recent music, I just came across the band Gabriels, and have been very impressed.

Nowadays, what do you do to unwind?

Despite being seriously ill at the moment, in so far as I am capable, I still enjoy running (often with my daughter), walking in the Peak District, and gardening. To keep my mind active, I have also returned to playing chess which I last did as a student, and I have completed a couple of tricky jigsaws.

I think about death at least once a day. Are you scared of death?

This turns out to be a particularly topical question! In the new year I was diagnosed with a type of brain cancer with a short life expectancy, though some people do much better than others. Obviously, this puts things into perspective, making the possibility of death a bit more vivid than it usually is in ordinary life.

I am sure this kind of experience differs greatly between people, and I can’t in any way claim to speak for others. But perhaps curiously, in my case, I seem not to be afraid of death – though of course it may be different for me when it is finally my turn. Instead, I just feel grateful for how lucky I have been in life with my family, friends, work, and so on. This leads me to feel I can hardly complain when I am no longer around to enjoy life, though of course I would be perfectly happy to have more. I am also spared the kind of regret that I certainly would feel if my brain illness took the long-term and self-reducing form of dementia that so sadly affects my good friend and colleague Chris Hookway. What I do regret, instead, is the effect that the outcome will have on others, particularly family and close friends, who will experience life in my absence in a way that I will not. But I hope that memories of really valuable and happy relationships will replace this immediate experience of grief, and thereby provide comfort over time.

So, while I intend no criticism, unlike you I do not seem to feel scared of death, at least at the moment. This is not because I have some kind of deep religious or even philosophical insight into mortality, as in fact I see it the other way round, as a simply obvious part of a natural process. But curiously enough, this perspective may have arisen from an odd experience in my 20s when on holiday with Crosby in Portugal. One lunchtime, we foolishly both ate razor clams from a street vendor, which then gave us serious food poisoning. At one point, it had such a bad effect that I felt that I would welcome death rather than carry on with this gruesome experience. Of course, I am happy that after a while I started to feel better, and survived. Nonetheless, it has left me with this sense that, at some point, death could be something to welcome, which I suppose is how it will strike me this time round; or that perhaps the hospital so strongly suppresses my experience of pain, that I will have no real knowledge of what is going on anyway, and so I am indifferent about either option.

As I said, I only claim here to be reporting my own feelings at this stage, which perhaps may change when the time comes.

It does seem that overcoming the fear of death involves simply accepting the facts, rather than any profound philosophical insight. That said, I can’t imagine your initial reaction to the news was so…serene? How did you get there? Any advice for anybody out there struggling?

I do not pretend to be able to say anything to all people who find themselves in this situation, as I think in my case a lot depends on the kind of positive life I have had previously, and how much I have been fortunate to get done already. So if a person is struggling and distraught concerning the end of their life because they feel frustrated, unrealised, or cheated, I can fully understand and appreciate that response, and feel great sympathy, without expecting to be able to talk them out of it. And I can’t pretend that when I first heard this news I was not shocked and distressed myself. But I came to accept it relatively quickly because of the positive perspective I have on my life. I am also fortunate because in my case, the process of dying will probably be fairly manageable, whereas again in other cases it can be terribly traumatic, which is another alternative to my situation that I do not pretend to be able to address at all.

I wonder if there is anything I could say to my loved ones, my son, for example, if I died. Something comforting beyond you’ll always have your memories, you know? My god, I’m a philosopher!

I take it that you are now asking how you might comfort your beloved, rather than yourself? I agree that that is much harder, as they would go through the experience of your death in a way that you will not. But again, perhaps there is a difference when the relationship with one’s family is still unfulfilled and in development (in which the kids are young or teenagers, for example), and when they are mature and have their own lives (as in my case), in which looking back at what has been can then provide enough by way of  comfort, instead of a sense of loss concerning what is yet to come.  

While I don’t think that one person’s life and death can be a template for everyone else, in the months since my diagnosis, we as a family have learned much which has been helpful to us, and possibly might be to others. My current circumstances have cleared a space in which superficial concerns have fallen away and a better focus has emerged.  This is true for friends as well, as the contemplation of one death enables us all to consider our own individual mortality and reconsider our priorities. It has been a good time, not precisely a happy time, but there have been moments of humour and joy which I hope will translate into the resilience they will need in order to face the inevitable sorrows and difficulties their own lives will contain, which unfortunately will include the loss of mine.  

You may have hoped for me to appeal to more than this form of comfort, but I am afraid it is all I can offer you, even if it feels rather beneath what is properly philosophical. As my line of work is the same as yours, I can sympathise with the desire for philosophy to offer additional help and insight. But in this case, I think perhaps philosophy has been rather disappointing. On the secular side, there is the broadly Stoical view which says you should not fear death as you will not be around to actually experience it. But that seems not to go far enough, as of course it doesn’t really explain why you should not fear the process of dying which you will experience while alive, nor why you should not still be dreadfully regretful at the death of others, which is the hard case you are raising. Conversely a religious position that aims to go beyond what I have said will doubtless bring in various forms of transcendent ideas such as a life beyond death – but this fails to accept that death is simply part of the human condition as the natural beings we are, and not much more philosophically ambitious can be said than that, or so it seems to me.

If you could ask an omniscient, omnibenevolent, perfectly honest being one question and get an answer, what would it be?

I suppose questions about death might be an obvious choice, given what we have been speaking about just now. But in fact, perhaps oddly, I would be more interested in another question that is related to my recent focus on Luther and his critical view of free will. So here is what I would ask this enviable being: When you do the good, do you make a choice or does your omnibenevolent reason simply tell you what is to be done and you get on with it, without making any choices? I had been planning to spend my next research period exploring whether the latter option rather than the former one is the right answer when it comes to thinking about the nature of freedom – but now I won’t have enough time to indulge in that investigation given my situation. So a quick response would be much appreciated, to enable me to cut to the chase!

Thank you so much for your time, Robert.

No problem at all, thank you!

[interviewer: Cliff Sosis]