All posts filed under: science and philosophy

25. Menopause and medicine

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Louise Foxcroft: Hot Flushes, Cold Science “There was a physician called John Fothergill in the late eighteenth century who said that it was amazing that women had been taught to dread this natural phenomenon.” As Louise Foxcroft’s sometimes shocking history of the menopause shows, Fothergill was very much in the minority. The medical profession in Fothergill’s day was just beginning to cotton on to the idea that the menopause offered a lucrative new subject for treatment.

De profundis

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I’ve begun producing a podcast for Blackwell Bookshop Online, which you can find here. In the first podcast, I talk to Philip Hoare about his book on the whale, Leviathan (so I suppose in a sense a literal podcast). The book, which was one of my favourite non-fiction titles of 2008, explores both the author’s own response to the whale (including swimming with them) and that of science and literature. It contains many fascinating pages on Melville, Moby Dick and the whaling industry; indeed, it presents a compelling case for seeing nineteenth-century American as being built on whaling. It also sounds a profound warning note for the fate of the whale and their marine environment; ironically, it turns out that commercial whaling was not the most damaging thing we could do to whales. Philip’s pages on whale society, culture and longevity are deeply sobering. His book is highly recommended. I’ll post links to other titles included in the first podcast here shortly.

20. “Grub first, ethics later”

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The first Podularity podcast of 2009 is an interview with polymath Raymond Tallis about his most recent book, Hunger, which appears in the Art of Living series from Acumen Publishing. The Times has described Tallis as “the Lennox Lewis of the intellectual world – a formidable heavyweight” and, as you might expect from such a wide-ranging thinker, his essay on hunger goes beyond the satisfaction of our physiological desires to look at a whole range of human appetites and desires.

19. Mark Vernon on: What is wellbeing?

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Mark Vernon has just brought out a book on wellbeing in a new series of which he’s general editor. But this isn’t a run-of-the-mill self-help series. The series is called The Art of Living  and it’s published by independent philosophy specialist, Acumen. Their stated aim is to “open up philosophy’s riches to a wider public once again”. Consequently, authors have been asked to tackle the big question “How should we live?” in relation to a diverse selection of topics, including hunger, illness, work and sex. (You can hear my interview with Raymond Tallis on Hunger in a couple of weeks.) So the books have practical ambitions, but they’re rooted in an understanding of philosophical tradition (though this isn’t limited to the western canon). In the interview I was keen to get Mark to tease apart wellbeing and happiness. Happiness has been the subject of many books recently, whereas we tend to think of wellbeing as more of a Sunday supplement concept that embraces getting a good night’s sleep and drinking less caffeine. So what exactly …

18. Julian Baggini: Mistrust the lucky ducky

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“In marketing and in politics people have got more sophisticated in their manipulation techniques, so more than ever we need to know what they are, so that we can spot the truth when we see it.” Julian Baggini is the first guest to pay a return visit to the Podularity studio. I last interviewed him back in March in programme 8, A Philosopher in Everytown, when he talked to me about the folk philosophy of the English.

17. “Unstitching the carefully tailored suit” – among the dead philosophers

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“The book is written against the view that a philosopher’s biography is of no importance and that philosophy can be reduced to a series of systems of thought. It’s really an attempt to rewrite the history of philosophy as a history of philosophers. That was the way that philosophy was taught until the eighteenth century. So in a way it’s a revival of a rather ancient idea of philosophy being taught through exemplary biography or the idea of philosophy as a way of life.” In this week’s podcast I talk to Simon Critchley about his recently published Book of Dead Philosophers. The book might at first seem like one of those forgettable book of quirky lists and miscellaneous bizzareries, but in fact it’s much more than that. As Jonathan Derbyshire put it in his Guardian review: “These descriptions aren’t just intended to be diverting, however (though they are certainly that); Critchley says that they are also meant to challenge a conception of philosophy which holds that it is a form of abstract, conceptual inquiry that …

16. “Our sweaty ape hands on the thermostat”

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“The chemistry of this is more than a century old… The basic physics of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases has been known for a very long time. In fact some back-of-the-envelope calculations were made then which more or less stand the test of time a century later.” A few weeks back I met Mark Lynas in Oxford to talk about his book, Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet, shortly before the book won this year’s Royal Society Science Book Prize. The book looks degree by degree at the consequences for the Earth, its biodiversity and its inhabitants, as average global temperatures continue to rise throughout this century. The book is alarming without being alarmist, sobering without being defeatist. As the Royal Society recognized, the book represents a magnificent achievement on Mark’s part, who sifted through a huge amount of scientific data in order to construct such readable and readily comprehensible scenarios. Average rises in global temperature of up to two degrees have serious consequences; above that, the consequences range from the dramatic …

What’s the big idea?

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In May I made a number of recordings for this year’s Bristol Festival of Ideas, a series of very popular events which brought some high-powered thinkers to the city to stimulate discussion on subjects as diverse as the legacy of ’68 to why the human brain is not quite ‘fit for purpose’. I’m editing my interviews now for a series of podcasts sponsored by The Philosophers’ Magazine, which will be appearing over the next few months. The first one is downloadable now from iTunes here.

‘Places can’t stand open’

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“In politics there’s a constant endeavour to expose hypocrisy. Because people don’t like hypocrisy, it’s a very useful weapon to attack an opponent. But the exposure of hypocrisy – the anti-hypocritical movement – doesn’t drive hypocrisy out of politics. It doesn’t even diminish the amount of hypocrisy that there is. If anything it just increases it.” I was in Cambridge last week to interview David Runciman about his new book, Political Hypocrisy, for Princeton University Press. You can listen to the PUP podcast by clicking here (for iTunes) or here (for PUP site). The title of this post is a quote from one of the people David discusses in his book, the eighteenth-century writer, Bernard Mandeville, author of The Fable of the Bees, which was thought by his contemporaries to be one of the wickedest books of his day on account of the cool eye with which its author regards the hypocrisy of his time. According to Mandeville, the difficulty of waiting for politicians to come along who bear not the slightest taint of hypocrisy, …

9. Talking about animals

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‘As soon as humans make images, they make them about humans and they make them about animals and the relationship between them.’ My guest on this week’s programme is Martin Kemp, Professor of the History of Art at Oxford, whose latest book, The Human Animal is a rich and thought-provoking study of the relationship between the human and the animal worlds as reflected in art and science. It is one of those books which make you look at the world in a different way after you close it. It is full of examples of how throughout history we have drawn (often unflattering) comparisons between humans and animals, and it makes you realize that anthropomorphized animals are still all around us – in adverts, political cartoons, children’s literature – and the language of animal comparisons still infuses our everyday speech (from politicians crying ‘crocodile tears’, to a child’s taunt of ‘scaredy cat’ to the media branding a thug an ‘animal’ or a ‘beast’). When we reach for animal comparisons, we seem to be asking what it …