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Join us on our quest for the extraordinary!
Sam McKee (@polymath_sam) has 9 university qualifications across 4 subjects including doctorates in history and philosophy of science and molecular biology. He researches both at two British universities and contributes to both space science and cancer research. Meet fellow polymaths and discipline leaders working on the frontiers of research from all over the world. Be inspired to pursue knowledge and drive the world forwards.
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Polymath World (00:01.04)
Hello and welcome back to the Polymath World channel and we're diving into philosophy again today with one of my favorites, someone who I've had the pleasure of getting to know a bit more over the last two years. He's a very popular and successful philosophy writer. You may well have read his books and if you haven't, you can get them from all good bookstores. I'm joined by Dr. Julian Begini. Thank you so much for joining me today, Julian.
Julian (00:21.25)
Well thank you for inviting me Sam.
Polymath World (00:23.298)
It's always a pleasure and for those who don't know you, could you just tell us something of your career background and what it is you do?
Julian (00:31.022)
Yeah, start with a short answer. Well, I'm basically a freelance writer, I that's what I do. So that came off the back of a philosophy PhD and then co-founding the Philosophers Magazine which I then edited for a decade. And you know, from that starting point I just gradually, you know, to write more and more for a living and then around the turn of the millennium I became just a full-time freelance and have been so ever since.
Polymath World (00:58.5)
what got you into philosophy in the first place.
Julian (01:01.718)
Well, I think it was just an interest in the big questions, know, with big capital letters. I didn't really know much about what philosophy was. My father, who was largely absent, had a kind of a autodidact sort of interest in philosophy and was always going on about Plato's Republic as being like the most important book in the universe. But that, so I'm sure he had some kind of influence, but I know at school I was interested in the big issue topic. So.
When it came to A level, is senior year, think they'd call it elsewhere, 16 to 18, I chose politics, religious studies and English literature because they seemed to be the options I had that would allow me to explore those. Now I went to do philosophy and English literature at university, not really knowing what I was getting myself in for, to be honest, like a lot of people. It's strange enough I wasn't put off by the fact, I was reminded of this the other day.
that I went to my school library looking for books on philosophy and our small library had virtually nothing. It had Stephen Corner's introduction to Kant. I couldn't make a head nor tail of it, but for some reason I didn't take that as a sign that I shouldn't do philosophy.
Polymath World (02:12.559)
Where did you do your PhD and what was your thesis on?
Julian (02:17.068)
Well, it was at University College London and it was on personal identity. I call it footnotes to Derek Parfit, know, because PhDs are like that really. They're kind of very kind of narrow. I tried to sort of like make it a little bit more expansive. I managed to get Keir Higgor into Chapter One, which I was very pleased about. But yeah, essentially it's kind of footnotes to Derek Parfit's views on personal identity, which are very much in the same tradition as John Locke and David Hume.
and even even Buddhist views on the self, interestingly enough, although Parfit mentions that in one page in an appendix and that's the only connection he makes.
Polymath World (02:57.039)
So where did things take you from there? Because you've mentioned before to me that you didn't sort of feel the pull of academia. Philosophy started to take you in other directions, so could you tell us about that?
Julian (03:05.198)
Hmm.
Julian (03:11.278)
Yeah, that's right. I I kind of, I mean, I decided quite later I was going to do postgraduate work. So I had a couple of years between my first degree and my second one. And even then I just wanted to do an M.Phil because I thought that I just, a bit of underfinished business, I thought I hadn't got into it enough. And then that converted itself to a PhD. And all the time I had no thoughts of an academic career. And I do remember quite clearly this sort of strange recognition when I realised that everybody else of my postgraduate group at UCL,
wanted to be academics and were starting to do the things that they needed to make that possible like try to get papers published and things and I Realized I was the weird one not having that ambition. I think I didn't fancy it because first of all You do have to be very narrow in your focus. My interests are just broad So I didn't really want to be pinned down in that way
Also, I think I wasn't really attracted to teaching, which may seem strange. A lot of academics say they love the teaching and they love their students. But I kind of, I think it's, I always felt there's confidence about teaching. Philosophy is a subject where so much is contested. There's always so much you don't know. I was always uncomfortable about like even teaching it, even teaching it to like school kids, which I did for a while, I found a bit tricky.
I did one year of doing undergraduate tutorials, which graduate students did, and I found that I was in constant fear of being exposed to my ignorance by people who are probably smarter and knew more than me.
Polymath World (04:44.929)
Yeah, it's imposter syndrome hits hard the further you get into, well, just your PhD, let alone academia.
Julian (04:47.47)
Mmm.
Julian (04:51.96)
That's true, I philosophy is particularly prone to it, and in a sense, you should be prone to it. think anyone who's really confident that they know what they're talking about in philosophy and haven't gone severely wrong on something is overconfident. I remember this being said by, I think, Simon Critchley, one of the earliest philosophers I interviewed, who said, I'm paraphrasing a bit, but with philosophy, you're always only one step away from nonsense.
Polymath World (04:54.649)
Yes.
Julian (05:19.426)
that fear that all your words could be spinning in the wind is something that you've to be aware of in order to make it less likely that actually becomes the truth.
Polymath World (05:28.823)
Yes. So you do find yourself very good at writing. so you've made the move into journalism and writing books. And I've had the pleasure of having you speak and take part in debates at some of the schools in my area. And there's always teachers who are like, Julian Begini, I've read How the World Thinks. I've read The Pig That Eats Itself. I've read his books. I know him. So where did you find
that you had this particular aptitude for popular philosophy and popular writing and moving into journalism as well.
Julian (06:04.91)
Well that's interesting, I think I always liked writing. When I was at primary school, know, I just liked writing stories. And in fact I wrote stories all through until, I haven't written any fiction for years, but as a child I always liked writing stories. And like a lot of people I've got a little notebook which is like a novel, which is, know, probably about two and a half thousand words, but broken up into chapters and things. So I always liked writing.
and I always wanted to try to do it. In terms of, I don't know if I ever realised I had an aptitude for it, I just kept trying. I think that the only thing to my credit perhaps is that I do learn. One of the nicest things my PhD supervisor said to me, and I was her first PhD student actually, is that we would have tutorials and she'd sort of tell me, you know,
where the problems were. And then when I came back, I would have sorted it. And she was like, actually, it's really, really unusual. Most of the time with your PhD students, you have to have about three or four goes before they do it. But also, if you want to write for a living, you have to have a certain kind of discipline. And you have to be able to meet the demands of who you're writing for.
And that's so, important. you know, getting into journalism, think, just people who use me found that I could deliver something on time, readable, et cetera, et cetera. And also just try to be interesting. think, you know, I write a lot. Sometimes people say to me, you churn them out, which I take slight offense at because it makes it sound like it's kind of mechanical. And I think, no matter what I'm writing, always try to make sure that it isn't just mechanical.
In fact, it's one thing that I've noticed as a quality that I dislike in some people who are otherwise very, very good at writing for popular audiences, which is you don't get that feeling of thought in action in the writing. You get the feeling that this is someone who knows a lot, who has their views, and can communicate well, so they're just putting it down on paper again. I like to think that if you're going to read someone...
Julian (08:25.184)
on anything that requires some thought, you get some sense that thought has gone into it. They're not just regurgitating their views for the uptieth time.
Polymath World (08:33.091)
You do have a tremendous gift for explaining things. And it's, it's interesting. We've had Stephen Law on this channel as well. And we were just, we were talking about the particular challenge of communicating philosophy to a broad audience. I think it's actually harder than science communication, communicating philosophy for a broad audience. What was it that made you want to take up that challenge?
Julian (08:49.475)
Mm.
Polymath World (09:02.389)
and how have you enjoyed it?
Julian (09:06.018)
Well.
I mean in a sense, it might sound strange, but I don't think my main interest was in communication as such. My main interest was, again, having that broad interest in philosophy rather than the narrow one. So I never sort of think I'm just explaining something to somebody. If I'm writing about something, it's usually because I'm just process of trying to understand it myself a bit better, you know. So that's what it's really about. And then it's just doing it in really clear ways. So with the Philosophers magazine, I had a really clear
a kind of vision for what it should be, which is that it should be like proper philosophy and you should be able to read it whether you know nothing about philosophy or whether you know a lot about philosophy. If you knew a lot about philosophy, you would learn things because people tend to know not a lot outside their own specialism. So you could read an article on...
an aspect of philosophy you don't know and learn something from it. And the only thing was it had to be written in a way that any intelligent, well-informed person could understand. And you say it's difficult, but in some ways it's not as difficult as people think. It mainly, what it requires is an element of self-awareness that a lot of people don't have. So people seem to be remarkably poor at not recognising the things that they know that other people might not. So an obvious thing
jargon you have to avoid using jargon but I found over the years it's a running joke that philosophers don't really know where jargon starts so I always say to people if they're giving a talk and by the way epistemology normative these are jargon don't say epistemology normative unless you explain what they mean because if I don't say that nine times out of ten they'll throw those words in epistemic this and all of that and so if you if as long as you're kind of aware the
Polymath World (10:45.54)
Yes.
Julian (10:52.43)
You just have to bear in mind all the time, the reader may know nothing about this. So explain it in a way that makes sense to them. It's not, that's not as difficult as it seems, I think. Making it interesting, making it engaging is a little bit more difficult, I think. And I'm not sure I know how to explain how to do that.
Polymath World (11:15.471)
You've mentioned a few times about being broad, even though PhDs are always sort of narrow, you yourself have been broad and you've written books on a number of different topics. Would you say you have any particular philosophical interests that you're naturally drawn to?
Julian (11:19.788)
Hmm.
Julian (11:34.654)
Yeah, mean, think it's... Yeah, I mean, one of the things that I have been interested in is actually the nature of rationality itself.
So they're metaphylosophical issues, call them philosophy or philosophy, what it means to think well. That really does interest me and I was very lucky with that because I'd written bits and pieces over the years about it and I wanted to write a book about it and I felt that it probably was going to be a hard sell for the kind of more commercial market.
I managed to persuade Yale University Press to take on that book. It's called The Edge of Reason. And it's one of those projects, you know, it's the most personal book I've written, I think, in the sense that it's the one which is most about my own views. I mean, I think my own views aren't generally very...
important or interesting. I'm mainly explaining other people's views and of course I have my take on which ones I think are right or wrong, but I'm not so much interested in that in what I think with the edge of reason again. I think there's probably if you analyze it there may be nothing completely original at all, but it has more of my kind of spin on it and my angle on it than others. So that nature of rationality very much interests me, particularly because it relates to other issues as well because you know we've sort of come into contact
around religion, atheism, etc. etc. And I find it really interesting that evidently intelligent rational people are religious believers, which I'm not.
Julian (13:04.038)
And a lot of people who are atheists sort of just think this is just plainly irrational, it's a failure of reason, it's a local blind spot. And so I think one's got to understand how one can be rational in a way without, and come to very, very different views about this. And one of the things that is important about that is when we say someone's not being rational being rational, I think there's a little ambiguity in that. Sometimes we mean they're not being rational meaning that they're wrong, they're incorrect, they've come to the wrong conclusion.
But there's another sense in which someone's being rational, that you can be rational and employ rational processes and come to the wrong conclusion, right? So I think we shouldn't really call, if you're an atheist and you don't think the religious belief is rationally justified, you shouldn't call religious believers, say they're not being rational. They are being rational, but they're not coming to conclusions that you think stand up to the scrutiny of reason, which is a different thing.
Polymath World (14:01.391)
What was your first book?
Julian (14:05.07)
Well, that's quite complicated because I've done lots of things with co-authoring and co-editing and so forth. But the first book that was really, and I think probably the first book under my own name was like a pair of textbooks, which is philosophy, key texts and key themes. I think they're both out of print now. The first book, yeah, they basically aimed at that A level market.
Polymath World (14:22.575)
Were they for high school students or universities?
Julian (14:28.042)
And I've been teaching those things, so they came out of notes and handouts that I'd written for the students. So it's quite interesting to do that. But the first book, proper book as it were, and a trade book, know, trade book meaning aimed at the general bookshop was a book called Making Sense, Philosophy Behind the Headlines. It's funny to go back and look back on that book, actually, because it an interesting history. Our first iteration of it, I took to a publisher who was
and a fairly big publisher was interested, had various meetings with him and he was very keen. And then it was a kind of publisher whereby at the end of the day, the final decision was by the head honcho and the head honcho said no and it was dead in the water. And then I sort of hawked it around. I tried to get an agent and you know, like everyone, I have these stories of I've collected the rejection letters, but one person said yes. And you know, and I, was, the version that came out was quite reworked.
And I think even now, if I look back on it, I'd probably find it... One thing I think I've tried to get away from is, like I said earlier actually, idea of, here's me explaining to you how philosophy is helpful for your world, kind of thing. Here's what to do. I in a way I'm always doing that, but I think there's this... There's always this... What you want to avoid is any sense that you're kind of offering things on a plate, that it's kind of...
I'm just applying my philosophy and it's the end of the story. And I think if I look back on that book, in some ways, hopefully a lot of it stands up, it does help people to think a little bit about the philosophical issues behind the headlines of the day. But I think to my current frame of mind, I'd probably find it a little bit too, I don't know, perhaps something a little bit too straightforward, know, not sharing enough of the complexity and the difficulty for the reader, maybe.
I don't know, I haven't read it for 25 years, so I don't know.
Polymath World (16:28.623)
These things are always so interesting in retrospect and I wonder if this means we won't be getting a second edition.
Julian (16:36.718)
Why don't I thought about, I have thought about that, because in a sense it merits a second edition because the idea is, you know, I mean, it's as relevant today as ever. And the examples will be updated and all of that. But I think I would do it in a slightly different way, that's all. It's quite subtle really.
Polymath World (16:47.715)
Yes.
Julian (16:59.918)
But it's also about what's interesting as well. I think in a sense when that book came out there probably wasn't a book like it. And now there are lots of people who are saying, know, look at what Trump's doing and how about what he talks about free speech and what free speech really means. you know, basically using current affairs as kind of a hook to give a little primer on a subject. And then with usually some implication of how it should play out in that context. And I'm more interested in how...
I think one thing that maybe would be different is that think when you get into real world issues, what you normally find is there's something about the specificity of them which messes with any straightforward attempt to interpret them with off-the-shelf philosophical views. And in fact I am aware of that in the sense that I think the chapter I did on the Iraq war, first Gulf war, I think it was the first one.
In hindsight, I think that was a mistake I made there because I was talking about just war theory and how it applies there. And I think the issue was that if the way I was thinking about it at the time was I was doing this very typical thing of like saying, it's much more complicated than people are saying. And, you know, most of my peers were just straightforwardly against the war. And I say, it's more complicated than that. A lot of handling. You could see the justifications here and there.
You could also see that a lot of the arguments against the war were a bit simplistic. They weren't taking into account any nuance. But actually, at end of the day, what that meant was, I don't think I endorsed the war, but I certainly didn't go against it. And I think that, from my perspective now, I think, look, you've got all that theory, but then look at the specificity of it. At the time, it should have been quite obvious that...
what was going on, facts on the ground, this couldn't possibly have ended well. That's not a philosophical argument as such, It relates to the philosophical arguments. But I think it's important to always have that awareness. And I think this is what I was saying earlier about why I'm slightly uncomfortable about the way I approach the whole book. I suspect if I went back, I'd find I was applying these philosophical principles without paying enough attention to the specificity of what was actually going on.
Julian (19:21.301)
And that's why think, again, gets to my view that philosophy is not kind of a tool you apply to the world. It's a tool alongside others. It helps you to think about things. But you have to get really engaged with whatever you're thinking about and not just think you can come in with a philosophical parachute regiment, come in, sort it out, and leave again.
Polymath World (19:45.36)
The, now I really enjoyed how the world thinks. And I love that you followed that up with a book called how the world eats because these are great titles in a waterstones or black wells bookshop that can, you can walk past thing. Yeah, that's a great book for the train or the plane as well as, for people who are really interested in philosophy. anyway, but actually the first book of yours that I read was your very short introduction to atheism.
Julian (19:54.573)
Hmm.
Julian (19:59.254)
you
Yeah
Julian (20:14.35)
All right, okay, yep.
Polymath World (20:15.343)
And this is something that you're known for. What was it that brought you to sort of hone your skills and set your sights on philosophy of religion?
Julian (20:29.102)
Well, again, really wasn't. I philosophy of religion, most philosophy of religion has taught, certainly in schools, even undergraduate. I didn't find that interesting. You know, I got very bored of it. Well, these arguments for the existence of God, just felt were, I mean, first of all, I think that is obviously not very good, but also besides the point, because I've met very few people who believe in God because they're persuaded by the ontological argument or the cosmological argument.
Polymath World (20:55.939)
Yes, cool.
Julian (20:55.97)
Although strangely enough, the person who wrote the book called Philosophy for Dummies, which was on the record as saying probably the worst introduction of philosophy I have ever read, did claim that Pascal's Wager made him sort of like turn to religion, which I thought was interesting. But it was simply the case that I was quite active in, well, not that active, I'm telling a lie. We had the Humanist Society, as it was then called, had a Humanist Philosophers Group.
and we met and we wrote a pamphlet on religious schools and a few things like this. And I think it kind of came out of that. And also in terms of the journalism, know, there were always religious issues around that invited some kind of commentary from an atheist perspective. And also, well, no, no, it predated the God delusion, actually. That's quite interesting. I kind of forget that. So it was just a combination of
factors. think the point is though that I haven't been... I think the thing that most motivated me though was I felt that I kept hearing these same old sort of arguments against atheism and atheists which I thought were really very, very hollow and so there's a certain frustration, you know. So these sort of stock things people say about atheism, well how can you prove that God doesn't exist? Well it's not about certainty, that's whole point, you know. You're confusing being a dogmatic atheist with being an atheist, you know.
and simply why you are an agnostic. And then, yeah, but how can you have any moral values without? So they're very tired things. And I just wanted to sort of write something short that would at least address those things and show that, okay, you may not agree, but it's certainly not as simple as people think it is.
Polymath World (22:43.311)
Yes, and that's drawn you into opportunities to debate. And I know you were the keynote speaker at the Humanists UK conference last year, last year, I believe. Was it? Yeah, 2024. But yes, but you you weren't a particular fan of some of the arguments in new atheism either. So atheism kind of became something in the popular sphere that didn't really resonate with you.
Julian (22:56.376)
think so, Hopefully time goes.
Julian (23:08.536)
No.
Julian (23:13.358)
Yeah, no, a bit frustrating really in the sense that I was like in a very short introduction to philosophy, I'm making this distinction between dogmatic atheism and sort of reasonable rate atheism, all this kind of stuff. And how, you know, I was very frustrated that atheists have been caricatured as these bishop bashing maniacs. And then we had the new atheism and we had the bishop bashing maniacs. Well, not quite, but that was certainly the way it came over a lot. You I think.
calling your book The God Delusion is good for sales, but Delusion is not a title which is designed to kind of be sympathetic to the people you're sort of writing about. And yeah, the new atheism did sort of unleash that quite harsh anti-religious version of atheism, whereas I think to be an atheist, you don't have be particularly anti-religion.
I mean, I'm not really anti-religion. I am anti forms of belief that are dogmatic and harmful, of which I would include a great deal of religion, unfortunately, a certain fraction of atheism, certainly things like Stalinism, Maoism, Putinism, communism, et cetera, et cetera. And so these are the enemies. So one of the sort of things I've written about time and again is...
I've used this phrase, the sort of coalition of the reasonable. I mean, the people I think have the most in common are not divided on whether they believe in God or not. It's whether they are committed to a certain non-dogmatic and open-minded stance in which we allow for pluralism of views. And so from that point of view, I have more in common with that kind of religious believer than I do with the kind of atheist who...
who says, and I've had people say this to me, that they imagine one day religious belief will be treated as a mental illness is treated. mean, that is not representative of most atheists, but there are atheists out there who think that. And I find them as scary as like jihadists. Not quite as scary, no, not quite as scary actually, because they're not actually going to go out and kill, but as intellectually frustrating, let's put it that way.
Polymath World (25:23.031)
Yes, maybe, yeah, not to the point of death.
Polymath World (25:33.87)
Yes, I've really appreciated your efforts and your manner in trying to improve the conversation. I think in the immediate aftermath of the first wave of new atheism, you did have a lot of high school teenagers who were wanting to be the next Christopher Hitchens and sort of copying a lot of the God delusion style of discussion. it wasn't very conducive with
reasonable discussion or critical thinking. It was quite snarky. That's the best word I can think of for it.
Julian (26:04.502)
No, I
Julian (26:09.548)
Yeah, well yeah, but it's interesting in terms of this fractional stuff. I did get a bit of flack at least once. I wrote a piece once which was like criticising the new atheist sort of approach. It was given an unhelpfully dramatic headline I think which didn't help. But you know, there were these sort of websites, discussion boards which were very much sort of based around Dawkins and they were sort of really sort of laying into it. And there was this sort of, I think Dawkins himself,
He's a very interesting character because actually if you ever sort of speak to him and everything he's very mild-mannered and all that kind of stuff but he seems to have a knack of saying and writing things which can only be seen as intemperate. And he had this idea of the fleas, the dog attracts the fleas and so anyone who kind of, as it were, goes behind Dawkins and criticises him, you're called one of Dawkins' fleas, you know, and I think that's...
People should be aware of that kind of language. It's like the vermin and the lice and the cockroaches in Rwanda. People should be more sensible to us. You don't use dehumanising language to describe your opponents. And yet people were doing that on this site. I think that was extremely disappointing.
Polymath World (27:27.767)
Yes, it's not very winsome. There's the thing where you can win the debate but lose the person, which is good for nothing. On this topic, let's talk about critical thinking a little bit and how you can use philosophy to help people think critically and the importance of that. know, in your work both for young people but in your popular writing, this is something you try and encourage.
Julian (27:35.51)
Yeah.
Polymath World (27:56.932)
How can professional philosophers and academic philosophers help encourage critical thinking in the world?
Julian (28:03.862)
Yeah, well the short answer is by not being too narrowly philosophical. I did write, I wrote the book, How to Think Like a Philosopher, which was, but part of the answer to that is don't think just like a philosopher, you know, because I think that I've been, one of the things that I've become a bit, well, say disillusioned with from quite early on, it was quite striking how philosophers could be quite stupid, like everybody can, I'm not saying that especially.
is very easy, but I think there's a particular problem with philosophy because philosophers have the self-image of themselves as the kings and queens of critical thinking. So they often assume that they know how to think about anything in a way that other people don't. And that means they blunder in with their sort of like, you know, list of fallacies and deductive inferences and all that kind of stuff. And they don't understand, going back to what I was saying earlier about how the specificity of what you're talking about makes a difference. So I've got my stock example of this is the guy who...
objected when the Wakefield, Andrew Wakefield thing, he wrote, this is a person who wrote the notorious paper linking the measles, mumps and rubella, an MR vaccine with autism, I think, and that was totally debunked. And it turned out that the funding of that was very dubious because it was funded largely by people who were anti-vaccine campaigners.
Polymath World (29:13.686)
Yes.
Julian (29:23.98)
When that was discovered, the editor of the journal, it was a Lancet, which published it, said, had he known that, he would not have published it. And a philosopher, not in a big public way, but in public, says, yes, but there's this thing which is known as a genetic fallacy, which is that arguments should be assessed on their merits and where they come from is irrelevant. So the fact that if a Nazi makes an argument, that doesn't mean it's a bad argument. You have to show why the argument is wrong. You can't dismiss it because it was a Nazi.
So this is coming in there with this knowledge of the genetic fallacy and how arguments are standing for completely ignoring the really important psychological and sociological fact that there is such a thing called motivated reasoning. And there's a very good reason why in science you have to declare your interest and why it's not a good idea. People who have a vested interest in the result of an outcome should not be the primary funders of it. And that's the kind of thing they do all the time.
So when it comes to how philosophy can help with critical thinking, I think it can, but it has to do so when it comes in with a certain modesty and recognises the fact that its tools have to be used alongside other tools. Otherwise it's kind of disastrous, I think.
Polymath World (30:43.041)
Yes, absolutely. That was very well put. Another thing I'd love to ask you about in terms of your writing is free will. You threw your hat into the free will book arena. Could you just tell us why you chose to write your book on free will and just sort of summarize your position, particularly given Sam Harris and other people have written popularly on this.
Julian (30:52.045)
Hmm.
Julian (30:56.653)
Yeah, yeah.
Julian (31:07.808)
Yeah, yeah, no, I mean it's interesting because I mean in terms of my sort of going back to the career thing in the early days I was just amazed that I was being published and I could be published and I think I reached a certain stage into the career when I realized that I ought to... You can only write so many books and I wanted to make sure I was going to write the ones that I really wanted to write and the one I'd really wanted to write was the one which sort of came out of a PhD about personal identity, the ego trick.
And I reached a point where I could do that. But very different from the PhD. It took the personal identity issue and looked at it much more broadly. And the point was free will was kind of the other side of the same coin in a way. It's kind of you're to talk about personal identity, who you are, etc. And the question of, yes, but is there a free self there at all? Is it like the is the unanswered question raised by that book?
And I wanted to write it because again, well partly because again, I kind of did know roughly where I stood on this debate, but I didn't have it fully thought out. And the other thing that interested me was I did think that we talk about free will in philosophy in a way which is artificially kind of narrow. If you ask people what it means to be free,
then they don't necessarily have this kind of definition which is the starting point in philosophy, which is the capacity to have done other than you actually did. And the other interesting thing is that free will debate is also historically and geographically a local one too. It's not one the ancient Greeks had and so forth. So I wanted to kind of not just sort of like do a kind of primer on compatibilism and why it's true. Compatibilism being the view that, you know,
It is possible to believe both that everything happens as a result of a causal chain and we have a meaningful version of free will. But just to zoom back a bit really, I said, what do we really mean by freedom? And in fact, on that score, I you talk about the other books, I think the best other book on free will around was Dan Dennett's first one called Elbow Room. And the subtitle that was The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting. I thought what's so good about that book was...
Julian (33:30.072)
that he thought before we can talk about do we have free will we have to think of all the different things free will could mean and then try and work out which are the ones that have any value and whether we have those. And I thought that whole approach was exactly the right one and I think he did his book very well but mine was a different kind of thing altogether.
Polymath World (33:51.3)
Yeah, I love that and I encourage people to go and find it and really try and pin down where they fit in this discussion of free will. Obviously it's a massive, massive topic and something that has massive implications.
Julian (34:05.962)
It's still the one which I think is trickiest, you know. I I've written the book and everything, but I still find it somewhat slippery. I think it's, it is very difficult because I think the point is there is a sense in which we are not free in a fairly deep sense. And hanging on to the idea that, that doesn't matter for most of what we want out of free will is important.
But I think that the ways in which we are more fundamentally not free, if you like, they do have implications for how we treat wrongdoers, et cetera, et cetera. So I think in the end up, you've got this situation where, you know, it's a very, very delicate balance. Human beings have a sufficient degree of autonomy and agency that holding them responsible for what they do is both necessary and justified.
but not completely. Because again, I think one of the key things in the book is when people talk about responsibility, it's the absolutism. No one is absolutely responsible for what they do, right? But you don't have to be absolutely responsible. You have to be responsible enough, right? Responsible enough means you're responsive to reasons, you have a certain degree of self-control that you can do something different about it. And it's by treating people in this way that those faculties get strengthened. If you don't treat people that way, it doesn't work.
But because the bottom line is, at any particular moment in time, I think it's true that you are going to do what you did at that moment. There's no repeating that. It means that there is a sort of limit to how much you can blame people and hold people responsible. And so ultimately there is a need for a kind of compassion and understanding there. But it's a very, very, again, it's a difficult balance. I don't think you can provide an algorithm for this. How harsh should the criminal justice system be? If it's too harsh, it's holding people to account for things that they...
really could not have done otherwise in any reasonable life, which seems unfair. If it's too lenient, then what you're doing is you're not, as it were, getting people to take the responsibility they need, to use that muscle. So, yeah, responsibility is as much something we take as we just have. We don't just simply have it. We have to take it and learn to take it, and that's something society does. It's a very, very difficult balance. And when people complain that it's slippery, I kind of get the point, but I think the point is that...
Julian (36:31.234)
Too many people want things to be clear cut and they think if it's not clear cut, there's something wrong with it, right? I would rather have, I think, a truthful, somewhat messy, somewhat unclear understanding of what free will is than have a neat solution that says we either just don't have it or we absolutely have it. But that solution to me is just sort of like avoiding all the real complexity and uncertainty there is in the world.
Polymath World (36:59.459)
Yeah, I agree. I completely agree. It's a great topic in particular for opening up with young people. like running those sorts of debates and discussions in high schools. I think it really gets people thinking and gets people interested in philosophy as well. It's a great topic for that.
Julian (37:18.382)
Actually, one of most interesting, I I did some great, very interesting interviews for that book. I interviewed the woman Gwennad said who worked at Dartmoor, you know, which is a hospital for the criminally, they don't say criminally insane anymore, but know, people who are basically deemed to not be criminally responsible because of their mental condition and everything. And again, she's really fascinating, got a very nuanced position on this. And actually once, I've only once in my life have I done a session in a prison and I ought to do it more.
And we did free will in a prison, and I kind of imagined that maybe a lot of these prisoners would be very tempted towards views that diminish their sense of responsibility. It was the exact opposite, actually. People, they were very sort of like keen not to avoid responsibility for what they've done, even though, you know, they could easily appoint you to life circumstances, chaotic stuff, et cetera, et cetera. It's like being in prison and everything had in some ways made them realise that they can make all the excuses they want.
Polymath World (37:59.664)
Wow.
Julian (38:18.54)
But the end of the day, if they don't take responsibility for what they do, well, they're just going to be back and back again and it's not going to work.
Polymath World (38:28.815)
sounds very interesting. What are future projects are you involved with or future books you're writing?
Julian (38:36.364)
Well, I'm working at the moment on something around overcoming polarised thinking, which obviously is extremely topical. It is, it is. It's a difficult one in lots of ways because we have to get beyond platitudes on this because everyone thinks that polarised thinking is wrong and binary thinking is wrong and things aren't black and white.
Polymath World (38:44.527)
Wow.
Julian (39:01.496)
But actually if you try and drill down as to how you do that in practice in a way that you don't just end up with a of a sludge or a shrug of the shoulders, uncertainty is very, very difficult. So that's really interesting. And I've obviously got various sort of issues and things I'm focusing on as kind of case studies. Yeah, so hope to see. I mean, it's the kind of thing that I'm not looking for controversy, but.
I think if you look at, if you think of some of the more divisory issues around at the moment, if you try and, I want to try and write about those, not to advance a particular answer, but to try and understand why they're so polarizing and if we can possibly overcome them. It's hard to do that without putting the backs up of some people at least. So let's see what happens.
Polymath World (39:57.537)
Yeah, I'll look forward to that one. If people want to find out more about you or find your writing, where should they go?
Julian (40:05.73)
Well, I've got a website which is very imaginatively called JulianBagini.com. There's a newsletter you can sign up for and I have to say the newsletter is... I aspire to do it monthly and I think last year I did five or maybe six. So your inbox will not be overwhelmed. That's really the only decent way to do it because I've kind of withdrawn a lot from the social media now. really have. I passively...
post things on Facebook to say what I've published. don't actually go on to, it's a third party thing which just puts things there and I don't really engage with it. I'm on Instagram but not really doing much, mainly following local Bristol food people. So yeah, it's really that newsletter which as I say, it's not gonna clog up your inbox, don't worry.
Polymath World (40:59.343)
Well, it's been wonderful to talk to you today. Always a pleasure to talk philosophy with you and thanks so much for joining us.
Julian (41:06.946)
No thanks, it's pleasure, thanks.