I once raised my hand after a talk given by the prolific philosopher (and I mean prolific – check out his bibliography) and historian of philosophy Sir Anthony Kenny. With an undergraduate’s hunger for un-caveated clarity I asked, “Has philosophy made progress?” If anyone had a sufficient grasp of philosophy’s long historical arc to answer this with authority it was surely him – the author of the monumental New History of Western Philosophy. A pause. He seemed to find the question a little impertinent, or perhaps hackneyed. “It has”, he sighed “achieved a progressively finer articulation of the questions, and of the potentially admissible answers.”
The vision he offered was of an ever-expanding taxonomy of -isms and -ologies branching endlessly into filigreed detail: philosophy as a vast, finely wrought doily. I was disappointed. It seemed elegant but sterile, and not at all like progress. I wanted answers.
Despite the cynicism that necessarily creeps in over the years, after working through arguments and counter-arguments and fashioning make-do conclusions, something of that hopeful appetite for grand answers to grand questions still remains, tempered but not tamed. I love Wilfrid Sellars’ capacious definition of philosophy, as the attempt ‘to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term’. But even that is in danger of sounding a little sterile – as if philosophy were a giant game of conceptual Tetris, a jigsaw puzzle of ideas. It can surely be an altogether more passionate activity, not merely a project of mapping and organizing, but a dialogue, a quest driven by a need to make sense of things, to wrestle with the mysteries and contradictions that we live and feel. That is the impetus which brings me to the world of podcasting.
NOUS engages with leading thinkers working on deep questions about the mind. Each episode is a conversation. Some questions are pursued out of a sheer sense of mystery and wonder, and some have urgent practical and political import. How does the brain produce consciousness? Are mental illnesses just biological – and if not, how can we explain and treat them? How much of who we are is innately determined? Are there limits to the explanatory power of neuroscience – or will it eventually unravel the mysteries of free will and morality?
I’ve long felt that the most productive and exciting kind of philosophy is that which pays serious regard to the empirical disciplines. My studies, as both an undergraduate and postgraduate, straddled and, to an extent, integrated philosophy and science. The podcast continues in that vein; so far I’ve featured a philosopher, a neuroscientist and a clinical psychologist.
The core questions I will be tackling in NOUS encompass both the hard problem and the really hard problem. David Chalmers’ ‘hard problem’ is the attempt to understand how consciousness, specifically phenomenal consciousness, arises from mere matter and mechanism. Owen Flanagan’s really hard problem is the much broader and more personal challenge of how to hold on to a sense of meaning in a material world. The runaway success of the natural and human sciences, neuroscience in particular, threatens to erode and undermine concepts of human nature that may seem indispensable: the self, free will, rationality, moral and legal responsibility. How do we respond to this threat?
The project of grounding a renewed sense of meaning and establishing a science of human flourishing in direct response to the disenchanting prospect that we are just animals has been termed ‘neuroexistentialism’ by Gregg Caruso and Owen Flanagan. I love the idea. It captures the anxiety that we feel in response to the encroachments of neuroscience but also urges us to an engaged and constructive response. I hope that NOUS proceeds in exactly this spirit: confronting the implications of the mind sciences with clear-eyed rigour, whilst being animated and propelled onward by our need for meaning. Searching, if you like, for grand answers to grand questions.
My guests so far have lived up to this mission statement. Philip Goff tackles the hard problem head-on. Building on the work of Eddington and Russell, he has committed much of his professional academic life so far to developing the bold and brilliant theory of panpsychism.
Lucy Johnstone, my second guest, is a clinical psychologist on a mission to radically reform the mental health system. Instead of treating individuals suffering with mental and emotional distress as ‘patients with illnesses’, she argues, we need to treat them as ‘people with problems’. Influenced by thinkers like Foucault and Szasz, Lucy’s work takes on the mainstream biomedical approach which, on her account, mistakenly medicalizes away the meaning of our suffering.
My most recent (and most dangerously charming) guest was Raymond Tallis. A former NHS consultant and Professor of Geriatric medicine, Ray specialized in the neuroscience of strokes and epilepsy. Now full-time philosopher he is a passionate, if surprising, opponent of the naturalist project to reductively account for consciousness and intentionality. His response to the really hard problem is to relish and reinforce the mystery and richness of human consciousness.
Those are the bold inquirers who have featured so far. And there are many more to come!
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I would love to contribute, I am a physicist, and cyberneticist working on the architecture of artificial intelligence. If we have any hope of succeeding as a successful form of life, then we must begin to reason on the consequences of rapid technological advancement and whether or not it will actually lead to progress or regression. This of course means reasonable doubt, and intellectual stoicism as part of primary education, and teaching of financial reform as it pertains to human society, and behavior. The answer seems to be hive behavior for preservation, but at what cost? The problems with this, are of course, that disclosure lacks public consent at large.
I just listened to your interview with Tallis—very good.
By the way, there are different theories about how to pronounce ancient Greek, but I was taught that omicron + upsilon = the ū sound, so nous is pronounced “noose.”
Thanks Richard! Glad you enjoyed the episode with Ray Tallis. Yeah, there are a few different ways of pronouncing it. In addition to the ancient Greek, the word ‘nous’ is also in the English vernacular meaning something like ‘practical savvy’ or ‘common sense’. In the UK, that sense of ‘nous’ is pronounced as I say it in podcast.