Philosophy

The civil service is to be allowed to find out what job applicants’ ‘socio-economic background’ is. What abject drivel is this? Among all the different sorts of wisdom that Aristotle discussed, ‘practical wisdom’ was to the fore. It was for him neither a science nor an art, but ‘a reasoned ability to act with regard to the things that are good and bad for men’. It was especially vital for public servants. One of the characteristics of practical wisdom was the capacity for successful deliberation. This was not about understanding (which only passed judgment and did not come up with solutions); or cleverness (which was a means to an end, that

As if we did not have enough to cause us sleepless nights, the Royal Society for Public Health has demanded a ‘national sleep strategy’, presumably overseen by some sort of Czzzzar, to lay down, and one very much hopes rigorously enforce, strict guidelines on how long each of us should sleep. The ancients knew all about it. The Greek doctor Hippocrates commented that while it was natural to be awake during the day and asleep at night, pain, distress, psychological problems, symptoms of some physical ailment, especially indigestion, or simply old age were the likely cause of insomnia. For Galen, sleep and insomnia originated in the brain. The more active

As the national girth expands by the second, Auntie, never backward about lecturing us on the topic, continues to glory in the popularity of The Great British Bake Off. What a take-off, ancients would have thought. Philosophers, naturally, had little time for fancy cooking. Socrates argued that cooks had no interest in health, only in thrilling the client. They were mocked for the extremes they went to in perverting nature. The Roman poet Martial tells us that one Caecilius fashioned a complete meal from pumpkins which he turned into cakes, lentils, beans, mushrooms, sausages, tuna fish, sprats and sweetmeats. All very Bake Off. Athenaeus’s lunatic Professors at Dinner in 15

So Cambridge University has accepted £4 million from the makers of Lego (snort) to fund a Lego chair (Argos sells a kit at £8.99) and a research centre into the importance of play (titter). One must not laugh (shriek). Aristotle (384–322 bc) might have approved — in part. At the start of his ground-breaking treatise on animal form and function, Aristotle pointed out that there was something marvellous in every aspect of the natural world. He concluded that ‘we must not recoil childishly from the examination of the humbler animals… just as Heraclitus is said to have spoken to visitors who hesitated to go in when they saw him warming himself by the

To judge from elections, the purpose of politics is to win power by promising to make people better off. Plato, feeling this made the politician the equivalent of a procurer or pimp, argued that the purpose of politics was to make people not better off, but simply better — better humans, and therefore better able to run their own lives, as well as better citizens, able to make sound judgements about the qualities required to run a better state. In other words, politics had a high purpose — the moral good of the whole community, guaranteed by both citizens and their leaders driven by the same purpose. In a famous

In the endless game of word association that governs vocabulary, the current favourite as a partner of existential is threat. They make an odd couple. Max Hastings managed to get them into the Daily Mail the other day, writing that ‘although Islamic fanatics can cause us pain and grief, they pose no existential threat as did Hitler’s Germany’. A letter to the Times said that the Charlie terrorists’ ‘wicked ideology is an existential threat to Islam itself’. In those examples, the threat is to our existence or to the existence of Islam. But in this phrase from an article by Irwin Stelzer in the Sunday Times, ‘sincere believers in the