Berlin, Isaiah & Marcuse, Herbert & Barrett, William & Quinton, Anthony & Ayer, A. J. & Williams, Bernard & Quine, W. V. & Searle, John & Chomsky, Noam & Putnam, Hilary & Dworkin, Ronald & Murdoch, Iris & Gellner, Ernest
▶ Watch on YouTubeCoverage note: partial - the transcript runs to about 540,000 characters. Each programme's introduction and closing were read along with a substantial central passage, but not every exchange in full.
Core ideas
Magee frames the series as a report on the state of philosophy in the 1970s through its leading figures and movements. He opens with Isaiah Berlin on why philosophy matters. Berlin argues that most questions can be answered either empirically, by looking at the world, or formally, inside a system like mathematics. Philosophical questions, such as "what is a right?", belong to neither "basket": we do not know how to go about answering them. Over history some of them migrate out of philosophy once a method is found, as astronomy did once planets no longer had to move in perfect circles. The rest touch our ultimate values, which is why dogmatic answers from sacred books or inspired teachers never satisfied the sceptical. Herbert Marcuse recounts how the Frankfurt School arose from the need to rethink Marxism after the Western proletariat turned to fascism rather than communism. He portrays Horkheimer and Adorno, recalls the school's turn to the early, Hegelian Marx, and warns against trivialising alienation, which for Marx was a socioeconomic concept. William Barrett presents existentialism chiefly through Heidegger, more profound and original than Sartre. Its themes are death, anxiety as "human existence in its contingency" coming to consciousness, and alienation in the impersonal social self.
The analytic tradition takes up the core of the series. Anthony Quinton explains the Tractatus: language pictures the world by arranging names of simple objects, logic and mathematics are tautologies, and the later Wittgenstein turned to language games and forms of life, with consequences for anthropology. A. J. Ayer describes how the Vienna Circle used the verification principle like Ockham's razor. Ethics became either a naturalistic science or emotive and imperative speech, and philosophy became a "second-order" activity, "talk about talk", clarifying the concepts and methods of science. Bernard Williams discusses the linguistic philosophy of Austin, Ryle and the later Wittgenstein, its selective history of philosophy and its notion of clarity. That clarity meant "substituting complexity for obscurity", against philosophers who had been "dark and difficult" yet oversimplified. Quine sets out his physicalism. He uses behaviourism as a way of formulating mental concepts objectively, while explanation lies in neurology, and he accepts abstract objects such as numbers and classes as posits on a par with the unobservable particles of physics. John Searle presents the philosophy of language as the study of human linguistic behaviour, centred on Austin's speech acts and inspired by the later Wittgenstein. Unlike Wittgenstein, he wants a general theory.
The later programmes turn outward. Chomsky argues that a genetically pre-programmed language faculty, and more broadly a "science-forming capacity", makes rich theories possible from scant evidence but also sets limits on what we can understand. Magee likens this to Kant, while Chomsky prefers the seventeenth-century rationalists. Hilary Putnam describes the breakdown of the old picture of a single scientific method, inductive logic that cannot be programmed like deduction, "science" as almost a name for successful inquiry, and functionalism as a non-mystical autonomy of higher-level organisation, closer to Aristotle than to ghosts in machines. Ronald Dworkin explains the revival of political philosophy after the postwar liberal consensus, setting out Rawls's theory of justice and Nozick's night-watchman state with its historical theory of just holdings. Iris Murdoch keeps philosophy and literature apart: philosophy that enters a novel "ceases to be philosophy", and theories of art tend to exclude whatever does not fit them. Ernest Gellner closes the series by placing modern philosophy since Descartes in its social history, as the search for a validation of knowledge once the old religious certainties collapsed. He reads existentialism as an account of the post-Enlightenment individual who "cannot pass a buck", something he finds slightly comic as a learned profession.
Excerpts
Bryan Magee, reformulating Isaiah Berlin on what makes a question philosophical:
“a question like what is a right is something that you can neither find the answer to by looking out of the window nor find the answer to by looking at the internal coherence of a formal system and therefore you don't know how to go about finding the answer and this uh this possession of a question without any understanding of how to look for the answer is as it were the Hallmark of a philosophical question”
Herbert Marcuse on the original sense of alienation:
“according to Marx alienation was a socioeconomic concept and uh it meant basically this is a very uh brute brutal abbreviation that uh under capitalism men and women could not in their work fulfill their own individual Humane faculties and needs that this was due to the capitalist mode of production itself and could only be remedied by radically changing this mode of production”
Iris Murdoch on philosophy inside novels:
“the amount of philosophy they succeed in expressing in the book is very small really I think as soon as philosophy gets into a novel work of literature it's it ceases to be philosophy it becomes something else”