For most of its long history philosophy has had more than its share of dangerous people armed with dangerous ideas. On the strength of their supposedly subversive ideas, Descartes, Spinoza, Hume and Rousseau, to name but a few, were variously threatened with excommunication, obliged to postpone publication of their works, denied professional preferment, or forced into exile. And most notorious of all, the Athenian state regarded Socrates as so baneful an influence that they executed him. Not many of today’s philosophers are executed for their beliefs, which is a pity—to the extent, at least, that it is a measure of how much the sense of danger has ebbed away.
Philosophy is now seen as the archetypal academic discipline, its practitioners firmly closeted in their ivory towers, detached from the problems of real life. The caricature is in many ways far from the truth. The questions of philosophy may be invariably profound and often difficult, but they also matter. Science, for instance, has the potential to fill the toyshop with all sorts of wonderful toys, from designer babies to GM foods, but unfortunately it has not provided—and cannot provide—the instruction book. To decide what we should do, rather than what we can do, we must turn to philosophy. Sometimes philosophers get swept along by the sheer delight of hearing their own brains turning over (and it can indeed make entertaining listening), but more often they bring clarity and understanding to questions that we should all care about. It is precisely these questions that this book aims to pick out and explore.
It is customary on these occasions for authors to heap most of the credit on others and to reserve most of the blame for themselves; customary, perhaps, but strangely illogical (since credit and blame should surely stick together), so hardly commendable in a book on philosophy. In the spirit of P.G. Wodehouse, therefore, who dedicated The Heart of a Goof to his daughter, “without whose never-failing sympathy and encouragement [the] book would have been finished in half the time,” I gladly apportion at least some of the credit (etc.) to others. In particular, I happily give the credit for all the timelines and many of the displayed quotations to my good-humored and industrious editor, Keith Mansfield. I would also like to thank my publisher at Quercus, Richard Milbank, for his unflagging confidence and support. And my greatest thanks go to my wife, Geraldine, and children, Sophie and Lydia, without whose never-failing sympathy …