The Philosofa Podcast

Tune in to the latest instalment of The Philosofa podcast. Co-hosts Omar Hamdi and Broderick Chow spark a philosophical powder keg with the question – What’s wrong with inequality? They are joined on their metaphysical sofa by lecturer in political philosophy at the University of York, Martin O’Neill; co-author of the highly-acclaimed, The Spirit Level: why equality is better for everyone, Professor Richard Wilkinson; and award-winning artist, film and opera director and writer, Penny Woolcock.

Income inequality is a bit like hot sauce – a little bit can make things interesting, but too much can be corrosive.

Martin O’Neill helps to shed light on some of the philosophical arguments surrounding the topic. For example, a commonly held idea is that what matters from the point of view of social justice is, not equality of income and wealth, but equality of opportunity. Equality of opportunity means that all positions - whether in politics, education or economic life - should be open to everyone and should be allocated according to individual merit. However, Martin argues that the idea that there could be real equality of opportunity, in the absence of background conditions of some degree of material equality, is confused.

He also questions the much-touted argument that we need large income inequalities in order to incentivize the most talented people in society to be at their most productive. Following the late, great political philosopher, Jerry Cohen, Martin asks whether, for instance, a highly skilled brain surgeon wanting four times the average salary in order to put on her gloves might in some way be analogous to a hostage-taker making a ransom demand.

While Martin sheds light on some of the philosophical questions surrounding the debate, Richard Wilkinson explains his empirical research. Richard and his co-author, Kate Pickett, studied a vast amount of statistical data concerning the levels of inequality within particular countries and US states, and the degree of social and health problems in those places. What they found is that, across the board, the more unequal countries and states do worse on the whole index of social and health problems that they studied – including life-expectancy, rates of mental illness, imprisonment, homicide, educational performance, social mobility, and levels of trust - and that they seem to do worse in proportion to the relative level of inequality.

The lesson they draw is that, in developed countries, average wellbeing in society does not depend on average income per head or economic growth. National income and economic growth tend to be very important in poorer countries. However, in richer countries, which have already achieved a certain level of economic growth, what matters is where people are in relation to each other. A particularly key claim that they make is that it’s not just the poor who are affected by inequality. Rather, inequality impacts negatively on everyone within these societies.

Lastly, we have Penny. Many of Penny’s films have involved working with people living on the fringes of society – for instance, homeless communities, or, in her documentary, One Mile Away, members of two rival Birmingham gangs attempting to forge a truce. Penny brings her personal experience, and the lens of a filmmaker, to bear on the issues.

If all this piques your interest, join us for another great episode.

It brings us great joy to announce that episode four of The Philosofa is all about happiness! In this latest episode, Omar Hamdi and guest co-host Jenny Collier flex their philosophical feathers with the question – what is happiness and can it be measured? To help them crack it, they are joined in the studio by Professor of Philosophy and Dean of the Arts and Humanities at University College London, Jonathan Wolff; freelance journalist and author of, Sex, Drugs and Rock n’ Roll: the science of hedonism and the hedonism of science, Zoe Cormier; and writer, psychotherapist and former priest in the Church of England, Mark Vernon.

Whatever our path to it, we are all interested in happiness. The Ancient Greek philosopher, Aristotle, described happiness as “the only goal chosen for its own sake and never as a means to something else”. However, today the word feels so overused, even misused, it’s high time we stopped and took a gander at this most elusive of concepts.

There has been an array of ideas about happiness in the history of Western philosophy. On the one hand, there are theories that treat happiness as consisting in a life lived well. On this picture, happiness is not so much a matter of feeling a certain way, but of living a certain way. For example, Aristotle held that happiness consists in living virtuously. For Aristotle, virtue is about responding to situations with appropriately balanced feelings and actions.

On the flipside, there are theories that identify happiness with a state of mind. For instance, the Ancient Greek philosopher, Epicurus, thought that true happiness is an abiding state of freedom from mental and bodily distress. He described this as the state of simply ‘enjoying one’s natural constitution’. Or there is ‘utilitarianism’. First articulated by the Enlightenment philosophers Jeremy Bentham and his protégé John Stuart Mill, utilitarianism defines happiness in terms of pleasure or ‘utility’. According to utilitarianism, if you want to know how happy or good your life is, you need to calculate how much pleasure it contains versus how much suffering.

One of the complications with defining happiness in terms of pleasure is that there are many different kinds. In her book, Sex, Drugs and Rock n’ Roll: the science of hedonism and the hedonism of science, Zoe Cormier focuses on three of the big ones. She argues that the unique capacity of human beings to derive intense pleasure from sex, drugs and music is one of the gifts of our evolutionary past. According to Zoe, these sensual self-indulgences are not sinful, but to be celebrated. They not only make life worth living, but traditionally have also been important tools for self-exploration.

Over the last few decades, happiness has started to occupy an increasingly important role in the political agenda. As more and more politicians and experts have grown dissatisfied with GDP as a measure of standard of living, an alternative measure has been sought. Happiness has become a serious contender. However, promoting happiness among people requires the ability to measure it. How do you go about doing that? One way is simply to design surveys and go around asking people. However, psychotherapist Mark Vernon has his doubts. He argues that there are many subtle facets to fulfillment that are simply not picked up by such surveys, such as a sense of connection to others, or a feeling of fully participating in your life.

If all this tickles your interest then join us for another episode of The Philosofa. After all, who says you can’t have problems and smile – even big philosophical ones.

Time to get down and dirty, the latest episode of The Philosofa podcast is all about a little thing called L-O-V-E.  In particular, in episode three we ask the question, ‘What is love?’

In this titillating philosophical romp, comedy gods, Helen and Omar, are joined by an extraordinary array of guest talent. We have the philosopher, Simon May; the marital therapist and best-selling author, Andrew G Marshall; and the mathematician, Hannah Fry, who gave the popular TED talk, ‘The Mathematics of Love’.

In his book, Love: A History, Simon May argues that, following what Nietzsche called the ‘death of God’ - a period beginning with the enlightenment when loss of theological belief became the dominant movement of the age - a vacuum was created. There have been many ideals, like communism, freedom, science, art and technology, which have attempted to take God’s place in giving meaning to life. One of them is love. But as love increasingly came to be seen as a substitute for God it began to take on divine qualities. Human love, like God’s divine love, started to be thought of as being something unconditional, selfless and redemptive. May thinks that this conception of love, though popular today, is both flawed and damaging. Instead he argues that love is an emotional response to the promise of what he calls, ‘ontological rootedness’ – the capacity of individuals to find and experience a home in the world in and through each other.

For Andrew G Marshall, love, in the long-lasting sense, has many stages. But fundamentally it involves connection with another person, attention to that person, but also, he is keen to emphasize, certain all-important skills. These include listening, communication, but also the ability to have a healthy, satisfying, old-fashioned domestic. Argue more, he preaches, not less. But argue well…

Lastly, Hannah Fry tells us how the perfectly balanced world of equations can open up the unbalanced, topsy-turvy world of human beings in love. Hannah explains how the relationship dynamics of bickering married couples is mathematically equivalent to an escalating arms race, and why the algorithms behind dating sites don’t actually work.

Interested? How could you not be? So join us for this loved-up philosophy fest.

Roll up, roll up! In the latest episode of The Philosofa, Omar and Helen talk science versus pseudoscience. They are joined in the studio by philosopher Professor Ken Gemes of Birkbeck University (returning in full form after episode one); recovering academic and author of award-winning popular science books, David Bodanis; and the economist, widely known for his bestselling and critically acclaimed critique of mainstream economics, Debunking Economics, and for publically predicting the 2008 financial crash, Professor Steve Keen.

In this play fight to the philosophical death, our panel takes on that old and impenetrable chestnut – the ‘demarcation problem’, which is the problem of how to differentiate between genuine science and its slightly shady, slightly slow cousin, wannabe science, or pseudoscience.

So who cares about the demarcation problem anyway? The fact of the matter is science affects just about every aspect of our lives. A huge amount of trust and authority is given to it.  All sorts of questionable things have gained legitimacy and influence by calling themselves a science.  So the question what is the genuine thing, and what is not, is important.

There has not always been a firm distinction between philosophy and science. It was not until the great propagandist for a new scientific method, Francis Bacon, wrote his Novum Organum in the 17th century, that science began to be thought of as something very different from philosophy.

So what is it? Among the many things that pop up in this fascinating philosophical tour de force, from back surgery to Yiddish mysticism, expect to hear the name Karl Popper. This giant looming luminary, who legend has it was once threatened with a poker by Ludwig Wittgenstein, was mainly concerned to show that certain things, like Marxism and classical Freudian psychoanalysis, which claimed to be scientific, were not. Popper argued that it is a misconception that science proceeds by confirming hypotheses and theories through the accumulation of supporting evidence. The problem with things like Marxism and psychoanalysis, he argued, is that their claims are so broad and vague that it’s just too easy to find confirmatory evidence for them. Rather, good science is about making specific and novel predictions and then attempting to falsify them. It is a matter of trying to find evidence to disprove, rather than prove, what you think, and a willingness to change your view if the evidence is against it. This view is known as ‘falsificationism’.

One of the major criticisms of Popper’s falsificationism came from philosopher and historian of science, Thomas Kuhn. In his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, he argued that this is just not how real science works. Kuhn argued that there is rarely such a thing as decisive falsifications of scientific theories. Evidence can always be reinterpreted, explained away or simply shelved as an anomaly. When theories are dropped in science this is largely for sociological reasons to do with personal, cultural and political contingencies of the time.

So far we have only been talking about the hard sciences. What about the social sciences? The test case is economics. There is a Nobel Prize in Economic Science. Economic theories have been axiomatized and economics textbooks are full of mathematic theorems. But are the claims of economics falsifiable by Popperian standards? Can we conduct randomized controlled experiments in economics? Or should we think of economics as more like atmospheric physics or the science of the tides, where we have to allow a certain margin for error due to the complexity of causes and variables involved?

These are only some of the topics touched on in episode two. So get comfortable, have a listen and enjoy.

 Bring out the marching band, episode one of the The Philosofa podcast is now  online!  And it is only fitting that a giant online entrance should be made with that  firecracker of a philosopher himself – a man who without irony once described  himself  as  ‘dynamite’ – Friedrich Nietzsche.  In particular, Helen and Omar discuss  one aspect  of Nietzsche’s philosophy - what Nietzsche says about the value of  truth.  With them in  the studio to help explore the terrain of this philosophical  smoking  gun:  Nietzsche  scholar, Professor Ken Gemes, and veteran TV producer  and author  of, Into the  Woods, a bestselling book about narratives and storytelling, John Yorke.

One of the most compelling characteristics of the 19th century German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, is his tenacious commitment to truthfulness.  Nietzsche was less interested in engaging in the logical analysis of philosophical and moral views, as the psychology that lay behind them.  And his writings are notorious, not just for their reminders and descriptions of the grim realities of human history, but also for his assessment of the importance of some of those realities to many of the cultural achievements of humanity.  In these and other respects, Nietzsche’s allegiance to an ideal of truthfulness seems unflinching.  Pretty surprising then that this is a guy who calls into question the value of truth.

In particular, Nietzsche called for a critique of what he refers to as the ‘will to truth’.  The will to truth is an attitude of unconditional commitment to avoiding error and falsehood in your beliefs regardless of the utility or pragmatic value of doing so.  Nietzsche believes that we see this hidden imperative operating behind the scenes in many aspects of modern European thought and culture – in the activity of scholars and scientists, the predominance of a scientific world view, skepticism about and hostility towards religion, towards metaphysics, and so forth.

In the Third Treatise of his book, On the Genealogy of Morality, Nietzsche argues that the will to truth is an offshoot, or the latest manifestation, of what he calls the ‘ascetic ideal’.  When Nietzsche speaks of an ‘ideal’ here, he means an interpretation of the universe and our place within it that gives an answer to the question, ‘what is the value and meaning of human life?’  The ascetic ideal in particular is the priestly or monkish ideal of the life of self-denial.  It gives a low valuation of the bodily human condition and demands that we sacrifice or repress our emotions and primal drives and instincts in the name of some higher reality, such as God.  Nietzsche claims that the ascetic ideal is the only ideal that humanity has had so far.  It has provided the drive and inspiration for many acts of greatness and overcoming, but also for enormous suffering and cruelty.

Nietzsche associates the ascetic ideal particularly with the Abrahamic religions.  At the core of these religions is an injunction not to deceive or be deceived – to be honest and truthful.  Nietzsche thinks that the elevation of truthfulness and honesty within these religions has led to the rise of the naturalistic attitude and the doing away of the metaphysical belief-systems that propped them up.  He says that ‘intellectual conscience’ is now against these belief-systems.  According to Nietzsche, the result is that God is now dead.  Truth has taken His place.  Scientists and scholars are effectively the new priests.  Science is their religion.  Instead of suppressing their natural instincts and emotions in order to achieve salvation, they dampen the affects in order to achieve objectivity – a hypothetical, non-perspectival description of reality.

Nietzsche was not anti-science.