PHiLOSOPHY
and
LiFE blog

Peter Singer is so impressive as a philosopher because he puts his money where his mouth is - literally, in the case of his giving to charity: he confesses here that he gives away a full one third of his income because his utilitarian philosophy says he should.

The power of utilitarianism is that moral decisions are made in a scientific manner rather than relying on intuitions, feelings or laws: the only consideration is what maximises human wellbeing (and in Singer's case, animal wellbeing too).

He considers what developed countries gave following a historic disaster not unlike that unfolding in Burma at the moment. Britain's donation was about one-thirtieth the size of its investment in the Anglo-French Concorde jet project. Australia's contribution was less than one-twelfth the cost of Sydney's famous opera house. The utilitarian question is whether Britain valued supersonic jet travel more than 30 times as highly as the lives of 9 million refugees?

It's powerful reasoning, not least when it would result in serious money going to places like Burma. However, in general, it is I think flawed. The problem is that it treats people in an instrumental way, as if wellbeing were only a calculation. In certain cases, like the present situation in Burma, that works well since it is so clear what is needed, and what is needed is so clearly a good, deliverable thing: aid.

However, utilitarian thinking also justifies doing bad things if those bad things might result in a greater good at the end. Staying with examples from international politics, it would justify, say, invading Iraq - the bad means being war, the good end sought being democracy. The risk is that the number of bad things that must be done by good people to avoid the effectively limitless number of bad things that would be done by bad people means that the world gets worse anyway. And then, if good people do bad things, at what point do they stop being good?

Bernard Williams analyses the logic in his classic book Morality. He concludes that if utilitarianism is false then clearly we should not believe it. But if it is true we should not believe it either because its cost-benefit calculations will not deliver the world it promises.

That said, this is no reason not to give to Burma right now. The non-utilitarian argument is that pure human decency demands it.

Havi Carel loves life but, now 37, she knows that she may not live to be 45. She has a serious illness. It has sharpened her focus on her mortality, though in truth it is a focus which, if they had it, might result in anyone living more fully. Philosophy has helped her develop a way of being-toward-death, as Heidegger put it.

She talks about her philosophy of life in a BBC article, here.

Philosophy was traditionally a practical aid to life, a set of arguments and ideas designed to help humans improve their well-being. It is an aid for coping with issues such as death and loss and questions such as how can I make sense of a finite life? Can a limited life still be a good one?

Havi's written about it in her book, Illness, part of the Art of Living series that I'm editing. It is moving and brilliant. Ray Tallis has called it a 'masterpiece'.

The book is out in the summer.

There is a robin raising her young just outside my window. I know because every time we let the cats out, she becomes very agitated, hopping from perch to perch, chattering loudly, presumably as she tries to distract the cats away from the nest.

Evolutionary psychology would suggest that this is altruism in action. The robin is prepared to put her own life at risk for the sake of her young. From the point of view of her genes, as it were, it is better that she die and the chicks live, for then the genes will be expressed in another generation.

This is a plausible explanation to a degree, though if you look at it more closely, it seems flaky. For one thing, if the robin dies then presumably her chicks will too, they being abandoned in the nest. So the wise robin will not risk her life but ensure that she distracts the predator without doing so. In other words, she could be acting selfishly as much as altruistically, her own life being worth saving quite as much as that of her young.

Alternatively, even if this could be called altruism, it is a limited sort of altruism. The robin will only seek to distract the cats from her young: she shows kin group preference. Human altruism can certainly manifest itself when there is a close genetic connection. But it is not limited by those bonds, the fireman risking his life for complete strangers, and so on.

Then there is something else. I wrote about what the 'wise' robin will do. But, of course, a robin is not wise: she acts instinctually. (Presumably her genes, and other related factors, are responsible for that.) Human beings, though, are different because they think, at least sometimes. And when thinking is linked to action, it can often take us in a completely different direction from the instinctive.

Surely the non-instinctive is a necessary part of any account of altruism too: the soldier signs up against certain instincts of self-preservation, and undergoes a rigourous training so that when the moment comes, and they find themselves at the wrong end of a gun, their innate instincts have been completely replaced by the honour code of the military, and they are prepared to die. In so doing, they become a hero, with the suggestion that willed commitment - not the instinctive commitment of the robin - is at least part of altruism proper.

Actually, it you read evolutionary psychology, it is far from clear that there is a consistent account of altruism available. In one book it will say that morality is an adaptation, with the same ontological status as, say, teeth, and therefore altruism is an illusion of the genes. But then in another book you can read of the need for evolutionary psychology to have an absolute commitment to the genuine nature of human altruism. Even Richard Dawkins famously concludes his book The Selfish Gene with the comment that humans alone can rebel from the tyranny of the 'selfish replicators'. (And to be fair to the sociobiologists, it is not as if philosophers have arrived at an unequivocal account of altruism either.)

Having said all that, there is still something quite moving about the behaviour of the robin outside my window. She seems brave. Maybe that feeling is a pure anthropomorphism on my part. But it is enough to distract me. I must get the cats in.

So we had, here, something of Fromm on falling in love. What of the contrast he makes between that essentially romantic conception of love and his preferred form of love, standing in love?

Standing in love differs because unlike falling in love, which is premised on the fact that the lovers are still more or less strangers to each other, standing in love is to love a person because they are as well known to you as you are to yourself (or not as the case may be). Falling in love becomes standing in love, if it does, when the thrill of the unknown becomes the delight of knowing another and being known by them.

The difference comes out, I think, when you think of the difference between the exclusivity that people falling in love want from each other and that of the exclusivity which exists between people who are standing in love.

When you fall in love, you want your partner to be faithful to you because if they are not it threatens your loneliness again. They might leave you, and leave you alone. This is possessiveness. So it is quite possible to find two people who are apparently in love with each other and who actually feel no love for anybody else. These are the kind of lovers who are completely annoying to be with. They are so involved with each other that they do not notice the rest of the world. They make you feel alone when you are with them. They think of love as luck and that their luck is in – and conversely, that everyone else’s luck is not.

There luck is not in, though, because their love is, in fact, what Fromm calls ‘an egoism together’; they are two people who identify themselves with each other, and who solve the problem of separateness by enlarging the single individual into two. It is in fact narcissism – they love themselves in each other; they see each other as Narcissus starred into the lake. They have the experience of overcoming aloneness, yet, they are separated from the rest of humankind – which is why you feel lonely or annoyed in their presence. In fact, they too remain separated from each other and alienated from themselves, though they daren’t admit it and so become even more absorbed in each other. Their experience of union is an illusion.

When you stand in love, though, you want your partner to be faithful to you but not because you cannot be alone but because it represents to you the faithfulness that must exist between all human beings who are to relate well to each other. In other words, it is not an exclusive possessiveness but an expression of an inclusive love for all humankind, potentially at least. Thus, the nicest people to know who are in love with each other are those who make you feel part of their love, whose love generates a welcoming home, brings out the best in you and so on. They have learnt the art of love with each other and it results in generating love that they have for others.

Another feature of this love as an art is that it makes it essentially an act of will, of decision to commit my life to that of one other person. Hence the faithfulness again. This feels completely the opposite of love when it is understood as spontaneous, emotional and sudden. Also, it suggests that to love someone is not just to have a strong feeling. You may often have no strong feelings at all some of the time when you stand in love. Rather, love is better understood as a judgment or a promise. If love were only a feeling, there would be no basis for your promise to love someone. For a feeling comes and goes. You cannot promise that.

Fromm's classic, The Art of Loving, is full of arresting ideas, if a little dated now, what with his complementary idea of gender and poor understanding of homosexuality. I particularly like the distinction he draws between falling in love and standing in love.

Falling in love is perhaps the default idea of love today. When two people meet they are, by definition, strangers. So when they suddenly feel close and the walls come down, it can be possibly the most exhilarating and exciting experience in life. It seems wonderful and miraculous, not least for someone who has for some time being looking for the right person. Sexual attraction is the physical expression of that.

However, this falling in love is not lasting, since it is premised on the meeting of strangers. Once you stop being strange with this new person, the feeling of falling for them, and its exhilaration, will stop too. The miracle seems to be over. The risk is that the old antagonisms, anxieties, disappointments and so on flood back in and kill the previous experience.

At the time of falling in love, this just seems impossible to think about. Indeed, the intensity of the experience of falling in love, of meeting someone, seems to be the very measure of that love’s worth, again especially if when set against the previous experience of loneliness. This sets up a paradox though. If the intensity of falling in love is not a measure of love but is a measure of the collapse of previous loneliness, then falling violently in love when you meet someone might actually be the worst experience to have. Because once it is over, and it will not last, normal life – normal love we might say – can come to seem so boring. The risk is that people become addicted to falling in love. They can’t hold down relationships.

Standing in love, though, is what happens when you can.

Published in paperback today, though I bought a copy over the weekend, Einstein: His Life and Universe by Walter Isaacson is an excellent biography of the man. He presents a joyous blend of Einstein's life with lovers and friends, employers and events, physics and philosophy. It would serve as a primer in relativity, special and general. It tracks Einstein's reaction to the development of the bomb and his resistance to the Copenhagen interpretation, a position that he held consistently from the early days of his own, seminal contribution to quantum physics.

I have to confess that I didn't start the book from the beginning, but turned to the chapter on 'Einstein's God' first. I'd heard this interview with Isaacson, and felt that here was someone who would present us with the facts without seeking to claim a scalp for either the theist or atheist camp. Sure enough, Einstein is his own man on this question as on all the big ones he tackled in his life. His religious sensibility was based upon his appreciation of nature and that 'behind all the discernible laws and connections, there remains something subtle, intangible and inexplicable. Veneration for this force beyond anything that we can comprehend is my religion.' This leads to perhaps his most famous quote on science and religion: 'science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.'

He often used the word 'God' and 'Spirit' to refer to this force. In one interview, he explicitly said he was not an atheist, adding 'the problem involved is too vast for our limited minds'; and on another occasion, 'What separates me from most so-called atheists is a feeling of utter humility toward the unattainable secrets of the harmony of the cosmos.' A belief in something larger than himself became a defining part of the humble confidence that tended to characterise his presentation of his famous contributions to science.

However, if that provides succour to the religious, he believed neither in immortality nor in a personal God and, to my mind more challengingly, he was a fierce, causal determinist who would not admit of anything like free will. Determinism and God alike were both implicit in his understanding of science - one implies the other - and he drew on the philosophy of Spinoza to make sense of them, also admiring Spinoza's monism - dealing with the body and soul as one. 'Human beings in their thinking, feeling and acting are not free but are as casually bound as the stars in their motions.' Or drawing on Schopenhauer, he agreed that whilst we are free to do what we will, we are not free to will what we will.

As a result, Einstein suffered from all the expected difficulties faced by a determinist not just in explaining our moral sense but in defending why we should act morally - something that he certainly believed people should do. Roughly, he felt that he was impelled to act as if free will existed, since that makes for a better place to live - though, of course, the argument is incoherent. He admitted as much: 'I know that philosophically a murderer is not responsible for his crime, but I prefer not to take tea with him.'

Incidentally, given the on-going debate here about the significance and beliefs of David Hume, Isaacson's book also tracks Einstein's relationship with the thought of the empiricist philosopher. Roughly, it seems that at the start of his career, he was greatly influenced by Hume. Isaacson says Hume's works were like sacred texts to Einstein. For example, Hume's resistance to anything that could not be experienced, such as Newtonian absolute space and time, prepared conceptual space for Einstein to develop the implications of the principle of relativity. However, at the same time, Einstein's genius also depended upon his willingness to accept some postulates as a priori absolutes, and explore what that implied about the world. Also, Einstein did not seem to take on board Hume's scepticism about causal determinism, since he professed his love of Spinoza, the determinist, from the early days too.

When it came to the development of general relativity, Einstein moved on from the strict empiricism that he identified with Hume (and Mach). For one thing, general relativity depended upon the extension of special relativity not by thought experiment but by mathematics, so a more holistic understanding of the philosophy of science seemed more resonant, as Isaacson puts it. 'No collection of empirical facts, however comprehensive, can ever lead to the formulation of such complicated equations,' Einstein explained. And elsewhere: 'Imagination is more important than knowledge.' Having said that, the great triumph of general relativity was that it made quite extraordinary predictions that were then quite quickly verified by experiment.

In his reaction to quantum physics, he was clearest about his scientific realism. This had two components. First, Bohr had declared that physics was not about what nature is, but only about 'what we can say about nature'. Einstein believed things really existed in nature, independently of our ability to observe or measure them. 'Belief in an external world independent of the perceiving subject is the basis of all natural science.' In this way, he argued that quantum theory must be incomplete, since to his mind, its ethereal nature was profoundly dissatisfying. Second, he objected to the way quantum physics implied abandoning causal determinism, for all the evidence that it does. Hence another famous quote, about God not playing dice - something that, the reference to God admitted, would presumably not bother a Humean.

If anyone is around in Bristol or Oxford this week, I'd be delighted to say hello at:

The Bristol Festival of Ideas, Wednesday 7th May, when I'm talking with Julian Baggini and John Cornwell on Atheism, Agnosticism and God.

The Corner Club, Oxford, Thursday 8th May, when I'm talking about my book 42: Deep Thought on Life, the Universe and Everything.

Kurt Gödel is well known for his incompleteness theorem: 'The complete set of mathematical truths will never be captured by any finite or recursive list of axioms that is fully formal', as Palle Yourgrau describes it in his provocative and readable book, A World Without Time: The Forgotten Legacy of Gödel and Einstein. Gödel once offered a useful legal analogy by which to understand his theorem: 'For any legal code, even if intended to be fully explicit and complete, there would always be judgments "undecided" by the letter of the law.'

Moreover, he proved the theorem formally, throwing a bomb into the midst of the positivist interpretation of mathematics, and the formalist tendency that was so strong in the 20th century. As Yourgrau explores, its effect was to open up a possible gap between truth and proof, semantics and syntax, and completeness and consistency. That truth might exist apart from proof, but perceived nonetheless by intuition, was enough to make Gödel a convinced Platonist, though he recognized that there was still room for debate on the nature of mathematics.

However, it is the discussion of time that is particularly fascinating in Yourgrau's book. If I've understood it right, Gödel demonstrated that the existence of intuitive time - time that we experience as flowing minute by minute - is inconsistent with the time 't' of special relativity, since the latter is really spatial, a fourth dimension on top of the usual three. In short, if you have 't' you can't have the time of day, as it were.

He then generalised his find to embrace general relativity, where time is tantamount to the movement of mass in spacetime. This appeared to make for a kind of return of intuitive time, or 'cosmic time', associated with the mean distribution of mass and motion. However, Gödel went on to find some solutions of the equations of general relativity, representing fast rotating universes, in which time travel is possible, or at least 't'-time travel. Again, though, this possibility is bought at the cost of cosmic or intuitive time. In other words, if time travel is possible, intuitive time - time as we experience it - is not. Gödel then took a further step which persuaded him that time is actually ideal - perhaps in agreement with Augustine, who wrote: 'In the Eternal nothing passeth away, but that the whole is present.' (Not that Augustine thought he had it sussed, for he also said, 'What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.'

Now, apart from being a fascinating reflection on time, this is interesting since it is quite fashionable in physics books these days to speculate on the possibility of time travel, not least on the basis of Gödel's rotating universes. Michio Kaku does it here. However, what Kaku appears to forget is that Gödel's time travel is bought at the cost of intuitive time, this side of eternity at least.

In other words, I think this means that you wouldn't go backwards or forwards in time in such a time machine, as if you were traveling up and down a river. Neither would you be confronted with those paradoxes of intuitive time travel, such as whether, upon going back, you would cease too if you killed your grandfather. Rather, you would be past, present and future already. Or, to recall Yourgrau's title, you'd be in a world without time, at least as we know it.

Proving that academic philosophy can touch earth, The Philosophers' Magazine, invariably a good read, has had a makeover, and will now be known as tpm.

In the new issue, I particularly enjoyed Jonathan Rée's essay on philosophy as an art. (You can hear him talk about it on Philosophy Bites too.) Taking Leibniz's suggestion that everything only makes sense from its own 'point of view', even science, he argues that philosophical works need their particularity - be that a sense of history or biography - to avoid the contemporary sin of turning 'the wine of language' into 'brackish water', of transforming 'dances of thought' into 'heavy trudge'.

Today, enamoured with an absolutist interpretation of science, philosophy fails to live when it pretends to come from nowhere. But philosophers as diverse, seminal and personal as Kierkegaard, Marx and Nietzsche show what it can be when it comes from somewhere, which is to say, is approached as an art.

Two stories dominate the UK news today, the drubbing of the ruling Labour party in the local elections, and the 'human interest' items about the missing Madeleine McCann and the monster Josef Fritzl.

They show the best and worst of democracy; why, as E.M. Forster wrote, it gets two cheers not three.

The best of democracy is that ruling parties can be lambasted without bloodshed. Labour is humiliated this morning but instead of launching a military clamp-down, it must launch a political fight-back. It won't be an edifying affair. But no-one will die. So over the next few days, when I hear yet another minister on the airwaves admitting things are bad for them and that they must listen, I will take it as a manifestation of our freedom. Hooray, hooray.

(Just one qualification here. I say no-one will die. Well, you'll notice that when the going gets tough, politicians get back to basics, which is to say bigging-up on policies to raise voters' standard of living with cheaper energy, cheaper goods, higher growth, increasing wealth. If the science is right, and this exacerbates climate change, then we can't quite say that no-one will die.)

Aristotle called democracy a deviant constitution because of its tendency to dumb public discourse down; rule by the many means that anyone seeking popularity in a free society feels the pressure of appealing to the most, as opposed to doing the best.

To my mind, the way that 'human interest' stories dominate the headlines is a symptom of this. News organisations lead with them mostly because they believe it grabs audiences. Now, the situations they describe are no doubt tragic for the individuals concerned. But I fear that the wider public's interest in them does not show how empathetic human society can be, but how cruel. The implicit media assumption is that people are perversely entertained by these stories. The news cycle is driven by a voyeurism that longs for another detail, a new image. And apparently, that is right: many people are voyeuristically entertained.

Hence the missing third cheer. For in a society that embodies democratic principles, be that the free elections of politics or the free markets of business, winning more punters, for good or ill, is what counts.

Last month, April '08, saw a record number of unique visits to this blog, reaching almost 68,000, or over 2,200 per day. Thank you!

Having said that, it is always a little difficult to know just what those figures mean. The average length of visit is around one minute, which presumably means a fair proportion is what might be called passing traffic. Over half come from the US, around one in seven from the UK. The most common search that leads to the site is 'what is friendship', which suggests a few students, perhaps looking for essays!

I also receive loads of spam, filtered out by an excellent Bayesian tool. However, if anyone knows of a dotclear plugin that requires you to enter the letters concealed in a graphic before posting, I'd be glad of the lead.

Finally, I'm always glad of feedback and comments. So please do be in touch.

Last night, I was delighted to meet Gene Robinson, the Bishop of New Hampshire who, as his new book states, finds himself in the eye of the storm over homosexuality in the Anglican Communion, he being the only out, partnered gay bishop. Needless to say, he is an extraordinarily self-possessed, thoughtful and generous-spirited man.

During a discussion with others, this question was raised: what is the issue, more than any other, over which conservative evangelicals will not move on the question of homosexuality? Good one.

The consensus answer can be summed up in a word: 'order' - or better two, 'created order'. Like the priests of the old testament who wanted to cut geometrically perfect stones and assemble each in its place to build the Temple - and were loathed by the prophets for petrifying the faith in the name of such order - the conservatives of our day have made homosexuality the measure of whether the stones of the Christian faith are in or out of place. Admit gay love, they say, and you destroy the created order as God intended it from time immemorial in Eden.

To put it another way - a way apparently used by one of the chief architects of the evangelical case - N.T. Wright, the Bishop of Durham: gay love is idolatrous. It is a love which indulges the self over and against God. He doesn't, I think, mean so much narcissistic love. Rather it is love that refuses the created order in order to pursue its own passions.

Now, any thinking person might come back and say that all love indulges the self to a degree, and for that matter is narcissistic. But before dismissing the charge of idolatry out of hand, it is worth considering the thoughts of Kierkegaard. He also thought there is a kind of love that is idolatrous, not gay love, but friendship.

In Works of Love, he argues that friendship is exclusive, and its finest image of itself is of two becoming one. So choosing a friend, is a selfish choice. The relationship is not I-other, it is I-other-I. It is a jealous love, since to have one's love returned is an affront to the self. Friendship, he continues, 'self-ignites' - a pun on self meaning both that it is its own source and that that source is located in the self. Friendship is also a school of pride, friends never happier than when in mutual congratulation. For all these reasons, it is self-centred; it is idolatrous.

The ideal love, for Kierkegaard, is neighbour-love - that which reaches out unconditionally, to all. That is not to indulge the self, but to renounce the self. That is also the commandment. It is what the Christian must follow.

Two observations follow that have a bearing upon N.T. Wright's position. First, all the arguments that Kierkegaard makes against friendship not only apply to gay love, but heterosexual love too. In fact, Kierkegaard is quite explicit about that in his book. In other words, if the bishop wants to invoke the idolatry argument against homosexuality, then he condemns himself too, as a married man.

Second, I don't think that Kierkegaard's argument stands up. What he assumes is that human love is fundamentally monodimensional, in favour of the self. There is no room in his model of love for a mix of, no doubt, egoist but also truly altruistic motives. This reflects back to Giles Fraser's Thought for Today, and what Thomas Aquinas understood so well: friendship is a school of love, and moreover, given who we are, it is the only place that selfless, divine love can be learnt.

Similarly, the bishop won't, can't, admit that there might be self-giving love in gay love, thereby reflecting divine love. To do so would undo the idolatry argument, by understanding that the self can become a channel towards the other. (In fact, what other channel could there be?)

Which leads to one final consideration. By refusing that gay love can become divine, it is actually he who risks refusing God - he who might be idolatrous in preserving his idea of order.

Prompted by the announcements of the George Orwell prizes, I spent a very enjoyable evening delving in and out of his Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters (which you can pick up for next-to-nothing as secondhand Penguins).

A 1939 review of Power: A New Social Analysis by Bertrand Russell stood out for its aphoristic truths not only for then but now.

...Such truisms as that a machine-gun is still a machine-gun even when a 'good' man is squeezing the trigger - and that in effect is what Mr Russell is saying - have turned into heresies which it is actually becoming dangerous to utter.

Orwell has reservations about the book's liberalism, 'because like all liberals he is better at pointing out what is desirable than at explaining how to achieve it.' Moreover:

Underlying this is the idea that common sense always wins in the end. And yet the peculiar horror of the present moment is that we cannot be sure that this is so.

But for all his reservations, Orwell concludes:

So long as (Mr Russell) and a few others like him are alive and out of jail, we know that the world is still sane in parts.

I can always recommend Thought for Today when written by Giles Fraser. And particularly recommend the thought on friendship he just delivered on Radio 4, it being about friendship - and written, I might add, with a little help from a friend.

The message. Friendship always involves mixed motives, selfish and altruistic concerns. But as Thomas Aquinas had it, friendship is a school of love, a training in other-centredness. Therein lies its tremendous gift.

If you want more, it's all in The Philosophy of Friendship.

Go see the film Persepolis to see how revolutions - be they secular or religious, totalitarian or imperial - ruin lives. Kant was right: revolutions require the imposition of exactly the opposite of Enlightenment, namely the practice of new, ignorant prejudices and the submission to new, corrupt authorities.

Do you sometimes have the feeling that an opinion is coming at you from all sides? Right now, I have that feeling about the greatness of David Hume. The excellent Philosophy Bites had a recent podcast in which he was heralded as possibly the greatest English-speaking philosopher. Then I was reading Edward Craig's Philosophy A Very Short Introduction with the same accolade and a whole chapter devoted to Hume's Of Miracles. And, speaking at an event on secularism, he was again brandished as a champion.

Now, no less a figure than Bernard Williams said Hume had written one of the five top moral philosophy books of all time, his Second Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals - though Williams disagreed with him on Hume's denial of objectivity in ethics: according to Williams, Hume confused what scientific and ethical truth might be.

Hume is also a great read, clear and complex: that makes him stand out, not least if you want to read some big-hitting philosophy in its original language and that language must be English.

However, I can't help but feel that Hume's trumpet is being overblown.

For example, it seems there is a profound paradox at the heart of his philosophy that he tries to finesse but that arguably renders it incoherent. On the one hand, he is a thorough-going sceptic - doubting everything from his sense of self to the power of induction in science. But on the other hand, he falls in with the common sense philosophy of Reid. So having doubted himself, he then, famously, dissolves the crisis in a game of backgammon. Or having unsettled the foundations of science, he then declares it to be the best grounds for knowledge.

This ambivalence comes to a head in his thoughts on religion. Take the celebrated chapter Of Miracles. Though packed with interesting arguments - which is why Hume is undoubtedly worth reading - his scepticism about miracles rests on the observation that to believe in miracles requires accepting what someone who has seen a miracle claims to tell you; that rests on the principle that the world for them is the same as it is for you. However, that same principle requires you to deny the testimony, because you do not see miracles yourself, having to rely on the testimony of others. Believing in miracles is, therefore, incoherent.

However, could not exactly the same be said about science? I do not experience a world made of atoms, for example. I have to rely on scientists who tell me that the hard stuff of daily life is, actually, mostly nothing. So on the same grounds that Hume doubts miracles, he'd have to doubt science, and perhaps all knowledge - which is maybe what he did in sceptical mode, until common sense told him that was ridiculous. Maybe, to the believer, believing in miracles is perfectly common-sensical too. Who's to decide the difference?

Then, there's Hume's supposed atheism. Whilst he often begins lines of argument with a theologically positive statement, it is claimed that this is mostly self-preservation, and that if you read between the lines, his atheism shines through. I don't see it myself. For one thing, his most sustained critique of belief in God, the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, was published posthumously and presented its arguments via characters rather than in his own voice, both strategies for minimizing personal risk and maximizing self-expression.

And then, when you turn to the Dialogues, and see the character Philo as closest to Hume, since Philo is the sceptic, you read that Philo admits that the reasons for and against the existence of God ultimately hang in the balance: ‘(I) believe that the arguments on which it is established exceed the objections which lie against it,’ he concludes. This would suggest that Hume is certainly against organized religion but is an agnostic when it comes to the particular question of God.

The irony is that when the Dialogues were published they hardly caused a ripple.

In his own lifetime, I believe, Hume was known as a great historian. Maybe there is a good reason for that. Or am I missing something?

A German bomber pilot, now old and in ill-health, has returned to Bath to apologise for his part in the blitz on that city. I was asked to comment about it, and digging around for some ancient Greek references, came to the conclusion that the concept of forgiveness is possibly one of the most distinctive contributions of Christian philosophy.

The ancient Greek philosophers had the word, but they did not see it as a virtue. They were far more interested in a proper understanding of what is right. Plato hardly has any ethical references to forgiveness. Instead, as Socrates argues in the Gorgias: 'doing what's unjust is more to be guarded against than suffering it.' The model case is Socrates in the Apology. Here he believes that his accusers can do him no harm, since he has done no wrong. He therefore feels no resentment or injury and so there is no need for him to forgive them.

In the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle writes: 'there is pardon, whenever someone does a wrong action because of conditions of a sort that overstrain human nature, and that no one would endure.' He argues that actions can be excused if they are both caused by ignorance and committed in ignorance. Or again, pardon is possible when something was done because of a natural emotion, but not when because of a willful appetite.

To put it another way, the virtue is not forgiveness but overcoming ignorance. Then, wrong-doing takes care of itself, as it were.

What the Christian dispensation does is change the terms of debate. Ignorance becomes part of the larger problem of sin; understanding part of forgiveness. The downside of this switch is the context within which it places everyone - that of original sin: everyone is ignorant and permanently so - or at least fundamentally incapable of overcoming that which leads them to do wrong. So everyone has a need of forgiveness.

That would have offended the ancient Greeks since it offends the virtue of human self-sufficiency. The same offense can be heard in the contemporary objections to the Christian doctrine: by condemning humankind, apart from God's forgiveness, it humbles humankind and renders us servile.

But the upside of the Christian concept of forgiveness is, in short, that you can be forgiven, and with it move into a freer tomorrow. The old can be put off, and the new put on. In the ancient world, people tended to be shackled to their fate; individuals would dig around in the entrails of animals to see what luck might bring.

This morning’s In Our Time was on a philosophical staple, materialism. A great fan of the programme, I found this one disappointing.

I think it was because it treated materialism too simply, as one thing, more or less consistent over time. In particular, the programme failed to distinguish between materialism, physicalism (that everything is physical or an epiphenomenon of the physical) and naturalism (another rather broad doctrine, roughly that reality can be accounted for by natural explanations). It might be thought that this critique is one for the seminar not the radio. But I think it explains why the programme made for a rather messy discussion, to my mind, and had to fall back on a rather tendentious idea to hold it together, namely that materialism, whatever it might be, is more or less automatically anti-religious.

On that point, Christian thought was presented as simply dualistic, with matter being bad, and mind or soul being good. But the reality is that in Christian thought matter is not simply bad. After all, the doctrine of the incarnation is that God became man, which is to say that somehow divinity embraces matter. This is the reason, as Pauline scholars are no doubt exhausted with saying, that Saint Paul did not deploy the categories of matter and mind, but flesh and spirit – flesh being matter that has gone bad, and the life of the spirit including matter that is good, not least the resurrection of the body. You may not believe in the incarnation or the resurrection of the body. But that Christians do should suggest that they are not simply anti-materialists.

From a different period, that of ancient Greek philosophy, I sensed a different kind of distortion. This could be summed up as asking whether it is true that the ancient Greek materialists – Thales, Epicurus and the like – were materialists much in our sense?

Take Thales' statement that everything is one and that ‘one’ is water. First, this did not stop him believing in gods. Second, what he meant by water was not hydrogen dioxide. Thus, if the appeal of water to Thales is taken as being that he believed everything comes from water – by analogy with ice, liquid water and steam – then this does not imply a scientific materialism. That requires an inference of the sort that Y is made of X if Y arises from X, one that only comes with modern science. Thales could probably not make that inference. It would be better to say that for Thales, it is not very clear what was meant by saying all was one. For example, it could be that Thales thought water is completely changed in its different manifestations; it could be that the appeal of water for Thales was actually that it enabled him to transcend a physicalist conception of reality altogether, water uniting both ice (matter) and steam (as a gas, like spirit). Or water might have been a metaphor for an entirely mystical view of ultimate reality. After all, he also said: ‘All things are full of gods.’

In a different way, Epircurus’ atomistic materialism is arguably less materialistic than it might first appear. For example, it includes what can be called ‘soul atoms’ that animate ‘body atoms’ in living creatures. Epicurus argued that soul atoms are too delicate to exist apart from the body, so he believed humans do not survive the death of the body. But he too believed in the existence of gods, indeed encouraged his followers to pray to the gods, in order to be receptive to the divine life, since it is their blessed happiness that Epicureans seek. Whether or not Epicurus thought the gods were made of material atoms of some description is unclear.

Descartes was discussed in the programme, of course, in relation to Cartesian dualism. But he is someone else who is routinely characterised in one way and so misunderstood. He is not, I think, a dualist, believing that there are two sorts of things – mind and matter – from which it is easy to drop the mind part, since, to a certain kind of scientific metaphysics, it seems a bit silly to say that mind exists outside of a materialist account of nature. Rather, he was what might be called a dual-aspect monist. For example, in the sixth meditation he writes: ‘I am not present in my body merely as a pilot is present in a ship. I am most tightly bound to it, and as it were mixed up with it, so that I and it form a unit.’ This is to say that he thought human beings were matter/mind composites. A soulless body, one that is dead, is as unappealing a state of affairs to be in as a bodiless soul, according to Descartes. Moreover, Descartes did not believe that matter was the ultimate nature of things. Rather, he thought that matter springs from a transcendent realm that can generate the form of matter.

This leads straight to modern physics, a crucial part of any discussion of materialism, though as Melvyn Bragg admitted, they ran out of time to do so. For with quantum physics it is perfectly reasonable to suggest that matter is a manifestation of something that is mind-like or conscious. Eugene Wigner said, ‘Study of the external world leads to the conclusion that the content of consciousness is an ultimate reality.’ The explicit naming of consciousness as ultimate reality might be a step too far for most physicists. A more mainstream view is that of Roger Penrose. He is a Platonist, pointing to the ultimate reality as the realm of mathematic forms. He talks of how this Platonic world emerges from the mental world; the physical world emerges from the Platonic; and the mental emerges from the physical. That mutual triangulation of emergence is essentially mysterious. But he sums up his position thus: ‘To me the world of perfect forms is primary (as was Plato’s own belief) – its existence being almost a logical necessity – and both the other two worlds are its shadows.’ I’m not entirely convinced by his interpretation of Plato. But the point here is that modern physics leads possibly most contemporary physicists away from any position that might easily be labeled as materialism: like the subatomic particle which emerges from a probability wave, matter emerges from something that is more like mind and, moreover, has the quality of necessity - that being mathematics.

In other words, if physics is the fundamental science, that would suggest that science itself might not best be thought of as a form of materialism. It is just that scientists who are not quantum physicists talk as if it were because it is useful and easier to do so.

In short, contemporary materialism, which is perhaps better labeled physicalism, might not only be a rather rare doctrine in the history of philosophy, but one that whilst with advocates today, will prove in time to be something of an anomaly.

I've a piece on Comment is free, the nub of which is below:

"Money doesn't buy you happiness but it does bring you a more pleasant form of misery." So quipped Spike Milligan, implicitly agreeing with what has become received wisdom in the science of happiness: being richer does not make you happier, once you have enough income to meet certain basic needs. It is called the Easterlin paradox...

Economists working on happiness have become very confident of the efficacy of this paradox. Some have even suggested that a government truly concerned with the happiness of its citizens would increase taxes. That would level out relative incomes and so boost satisfaction. Richard Layard, sometimes referred to as the UK's "happiness tsar", has suggested that tax levels at around 60% would not be inappropriate. Such a policy would probably reduce GDP, but then GDP is a faulty measure of wellbeing.

Now, though, new research is threatening to overturn the old orthodoxy. Two economists, Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, have presented evidence that more money can bring more happiness, if with no absolute guarantees. In short, they have concluded that there is no Easterlin paradox... There is "no evidence of a satiation point beyond which wealthier countries have no further increases in subjective wellbeing." Or to put it another way, GDP actually is a pretty good measure of happiness.

Easterlin, and others since, have got it wrong, they believe, because it is so difficult to compare happiness across different cultures and times - though less so now, as methodologies and questionnaires have become standardised.

Easterlin himself has hit back, arguing that if it was hard to assess subjective happiness in the 1950s, it is still pretty hard to do so now. Also, even with the new evidence, GDP is not consistently linked to wellbeing, notably in China and the US - two rather large anomalies. Stevenson and Wolfers have produced a "very rough draft", Easterlin concludes. Ouch.

The piece continues with reflections similar to my blog last week.

I read today that the author of Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert, fantasised about killing the mayor of Rouen, his home town, and then wrote about it. He was fifteen. ‘Often I’d like to be able to blow the heads off passers-by,’ he told his diary: ‘I am bored, I am bored, I am bored.’

It occurred to me that today he could have been detected and prosecuted for his thought crimes, and possibly never have written his masterpiece.