Burnyeat, Myles & Nussbaum, Martha & Kenny, Anthony & Williams, Bernard & Quinton, Anthony & Ayers, Michael & Passmore, John & Warnock, Geoffrey & Singer, Peter & Copleston, Frederick & Stern, J. P. & Dreyfus, Hubert & Morgenbesser, Sidney & Ayer, A. J. & Searle, John
▶ Watch on YouTubeCoverage note: partial - the transcript runs to about 590,000 characters. Magee's introduction to each programme, the guest's presentation and a substantial central passage of every discussion were read, but not every exchange in full.
Core ideas
The series follows Western philosophy from the Greeks to Wittgenstein, each programme opening with Magee's biographical sketch before a discussion with a specialist. Myles Burnyeat presents Plato as moving from Socratic questions of definition to the theory of Forms and recollection. He warns that the "world of forms" is not another place full of perfect copies: the contrast is between the particular and the general, and philosophising, "rehearsing for death", means thinking away from the here and now. Martha Nussbaum shows Aristotle grounding identity in form and function rather than matter. Socrates' matter keeps changing, dogs differ materially, a ship whose planks are replaced remains the same ship, and a heap of stuff is nothing in particular. Anthony Kenny explains how medieval philosophers, Aquinas above all, separated the tasks of theologian and philosopher. Reason cannot prove that the world had a beginning, and Aquinas believed it only on the authority of Genesis. Bernard Williams reconstructs Descartes' method of doubt and his reliance on a benevolent God who guarantees our clear ideas. That move bypasses scepticism more than it refutes it, and it requires that anyone of good faith must assent to the proofs. Anthony Quinton contrasts Spinoza's single substance and quasi-religious acceptance, echoing his Jewish background, with Leibniz's infinity of unextended monads.
Michael Ayers presents Locke as more open to materialism than often thought: either we are material things that think, or something immaterial is mysteriously joined to a body, and both are unintelligible to us. He reads Locke's book on words as a rejection of Aristotelian natural kinds. John Passmore argues that Hume's turn to essays and history continued rather than abandoned his philosophy, since the Treatise was meant as a preliminary to a science of human nature, morals and politics. Geoffrey Warnock sets out Kant's synthetic a priori, the forms of sensibility and understanding, and the limits of possible experience. These leave God and the soul matters of faith, perhaps to Kant's own disappointment. Peter Singer explains Hegel's rational state and his notion of freedom as rational self-fulfilment rather than the satisfaction of manipulated preferences, and traces Hegelian ideas into Marx. Frederick Copleston discusses Schopenhauer's metaphysical Will, a word he thinks misleading where "energy" would have served better. He also covers Schopenhauer's vision of a world of suffering and the temporary escape through aesthetic contemplation. J. P. Stern takes Nietzsche through the will to power, a reversal of Schopenhauer's valuation of the will, as well as the Übermensch, eternal recurrence and the aesthetic justification of life. He includes Nietzsche's fear that a democratic, plebeian spirit would undo the processes that created civilisation.
Hubert Dreyfus traces the line from Husserl to Heidegger and Sartre. Heidegger begins not with an isolated Cartesian subject but with Dasein socialised into shared practices, doing "what one does", from which authentic individuals must crystallise. Dasein is care, and the structure of care is temporality. Sidney Morgenbesser discusses Peirce, James and Dewey. He questions James's pragmatic theory of truth, which ties truth to verification or satisfaction, and praises James as one of the great prose writers of philosophy. A. J. Ayer covers Frege and Russell, the foundations of modern logic, and Russell's lifelong demand for justification, back to the boy who refused his brother's geometry axioms. He also describes Russell's empiricism of sense data in The Problems of Philosophy and his exhaustion after Principia Mathematica. John Searle closes with Wittgenstein. The Tractatus was repudiated by its author. The later philosophy sees language as rule-governed language games and forms of life, and treats philosophical puzzles as arising when words are taken out of the game where they are at home. Religious utterances should not be judged as failed science, and the private language argument remains much disputed.
Excerpts
Myles Burnyeat on what Plato's "world of forms" means:
“his contrast is between the particular and the general those questions what is Justice what is beauty are general questions they're not questions about the here and now and that's the contrast there's a point in the fedo where Socrates is saying that to do philosophy is to rehearse for death it is in fact to practice being dead”
Hubert Dreyfus on Heidegger's account of everyday social being:
“he says we all already do what anyone does I hammer with a hammer because one hammers with hammers in our culture I eat the way one eats I pronounce words the way one pronounces words in our country”
John Searle on where philosophical problems come from, according to Wittgenstein:
“philosophical problems characteristically arise when we take the word out of the language game where it's at home and then try to think of it as something Sublime we we want to inquire into the nature of the good the true or the beautiful instead of just looking at how these words are actually used in The Language game where they get their meaning”