Mick Hartley

Kathleen Stock reminisces about the old days when distinguished, largely male, philosophers were featured in Bryan Magee’s old BBC series Men of Ideas and, later, The Great Philosophers, now on  iPlayer. It’s a distant world.

All of this is very old-fashioned, and not just because nobody has the requisite powers of concentration anymore. The concept of a “great philosopher” has been suspect for years, a bit too male and hierarchical for comfort. These days, it always has to come with lots of caveats. In the short film which accompanied the broadcasting of The Great Philosophers on BBC4 this week, public philosopher Professor Angie Hobbs rushes depressingly quickly to the cliché that, as young female philosopher watching the show in the Eighties, “it was really important for me to see a woman on that sofa”. She also tries to justify the value of philosophy in the present day in instrumental terms, claiming that it helps people discern “the fake news and the conspiracy theories and the snake oil merchants out there”. This is a point I’m surprised any member of the philosophy profession can make with a straight face, given ongoing mass delusions therein.

Well yes. In terms of clarity of thought, modern philosophy seems to me very much part of the problem rather than part of the solution.

But the truth is that the vast majority of the millions of viewers enthusiastically watching Men of Ideas and The Great Philosophers in the Seventies and Eighties were not at university, and had no desire whatsoever to be professional philosophers themselves. Fretting over equality issues, worrying about the latent prejudice of Thomas Aquinas or David Hume, or selfishly looking for inspiring “representation” was very far down the list of their priorities. And nor were they watching in order to improve their falsehood detection skills in ordinary life. Their aim was just to understand these enjoyable, fascinating, unusual ideas, as articulated by these enjoyable, fascinating, unusual people — for no motive other than sheer curiosity. I hear that corduroy is coming back into fashion. Perhaps we might also allow philosophers to be unreservedly great again too.