Julian Baggini's Reading List

"I didn’t want to pick manuals, but the one that is closest to one is Dennett’s Intuition Pumps . I should say that I’ve taken all these books off my shelf because I don’t have great factual recall. I read a book and even a week later, let alone a year later, I probably can’t give a good précis of it. But what a lot of good books do is that they change the way you think a bit and in that way, they leave their trace. It’s about how you think as much as what you think. Dennett’s Intuition Pumps is a really good book. It does have a lot of these standard critical thinking things in it. But he’s very witty, which is not very normal for philosophers. So in amongst Occam’s Razor and all that kind of stuff, he’s also got more quirky, unusual things. He has the idea of a ‘deepity,’ a phrase which he’s coined. As I understand it, a deepity is an utterance which sounds profound, but if you examine it, isn’t at all. Social media is a great promoter of deepities, these little quotes, which make you go, ‘Ah great, fantastic.’ And you’re clicking through them so quickly, that you don’t even ask what it means; it just sounds great and you share it and you go on to the next deepity. That’s right. And it’s very, very readable. One time I interviewed him, he said something like, he’s a serious philosopher, but not a solemn one. The point being that you can take your philosophy seriously without taking yourself too seriously and being too pompous. And I think that’s a good thing. Absolutely. There are typical characteristics of good thinkers but not every thinker has every one. Here’s another example from the book: the ‘surely’ operator. I love this one. Whenever somebody says ‘surely’, what they really mean is that this is not something I want to have to argue for. I want you to take it for granted. By saying ‘surely’, you’re inviting the person to think this is something which shouldn’t be questioned, which is a big red flag that you should. I’m not sure this book has done as well as some of his other ones, partly because it’s a bit of a hodgepodge. It’s arranged into sections, but it’s not systematic. You dip into it and take things from it. But I quite like that as well. It goes back to what I was saying earlier. This book doesn’t trick the reader into thinking that if they follow the steps in this book, they will be a great thinker. It’s saying, ‘there are all these tricks and traps and tools that are useful, but actually, you’ve got to work out what the best ones are in any given occasion and try and apply them.’ Because that’s the other thing: it’s all very well to have a thinking tool, but how do you apply it? Bad thinkers know the tools and misapply them. An example I’ve often used concerns a philosopher who had written a good book on reasoning and knew his stuff. He was talking about Andrew Wakefield, who published a paper about the MMR vaccine in the Lancet , a top medical journal. The paper didn’t actually strongly link the vaccine to autism, funnily enough. It was the press conference and other things afterwards that made the stronger connection. Anyway. It turned out that he had been funded by people who had an interest in discrediting the MMR vaccine and wanted to sue the manufacturers. The Lancet withdrew the paper when they found out about that. And this philosopher said, ‘There’s this thing called the genetic fallacy, which means that you shouldn’t judge an argument on the basis of where it comes from, you should judge an argument on the strength of the argument. So this paper should be judged on the strength of the scientific evidence and the matter of who funded it is irrelevant.’ Now, this is someone who’s got hold of a thinking tool, and he’s applying it, but he is misapplying it because actually, in science, experimental bias is a huge factor. Therefore you do have to think about who’s paying for it. So what in certain contexts is a fallacy—don’t think of the origins when doing the justification—is a legitimate objection in scientific research because of the psychological effects of experimenter bias and, also, fabrication of evidence. So you can have all these tools at your disposal, but you still want to think very carefully, ‘Is this the time to apply it? Am I applying it in the right way?’ I think that’s true. In fact, having a nose for philosophy can be a nice segue into the next book."

"Philippa Foot was someone I came to quite late. She wrote very little over her career. There are two or three volumes of papers, one might even have gone out of print. She wrote one monograph, which is this book, Natural Goodness . It’s a short book, not much more than 100 pages. The reason I wanted to highlight her as an example of a good thinker is that she’s not in a hurry to come up with her theories and her conclusions. She’s taking as much time as it takes. Again, I was lucky enough to interview her and Foot said something along the lines that she often does have a very good nose, but she can’t then necessarily pin down exactly what it is she has sniffed out quickly. It takes her time to really work out what’s wrong or right about it. I think that’s true. With Philippa Foot, you’ve got someone who had a real sense of what is important, and what matters and was patient in trying to work it out. She wasn’t in a hurry to present her grand thesis to the world. When things were ready, she would offer them out and that was that. It’s a nice contrast to the idea that philosophy is about ostentatious cleverness and the ability to be very quick and think on your feet. Philosophical education in the UK, historically, at least, has been almost like performance. People give their paper and then other people in the seminar are trying to show how clever they are by trying to shoot it down. The speaker has to show how bright they are by batting away criticisms. It’s like a gladiatorial combat, really. It’s all about that cleverness, smartness, fastness. Philippa Foot wasn’t like that at all, and I think it’s really important. There are people like Philippa Foot: more careful, slow, considered thinkers. She’s a very clear writer, but it’s a subtle book. It’s short, but you should read it slowly and carefully. But yes, it is something I’d recommend to a general reader. All of these books I’ve chosen are ones I think a general reader could read. I haven’t picked anything which is too academic or dry. It’s about this idea, which is often attributed to David Hume, that there is an is/ought gap or fact/value distinction. In its strong form, this says that you can’t derive any conclusions about the way things ought to be by merely observing how they are. A statement of the fact that x is the case or something is the case, doesn’t ever generate the idea that something ought to be the case. But often we assume there’s a very strong and obvious link. For example, if you were to say to a child, ‘Don’t do that to the dog’ and they ask why not, you might say, ‘The dog doesn’t like it, it hurts.’ Now, we assume that means that therefore you ought not to do it. But there’s a logical gap. If the child then says, ‘Okay, it hurts the dog, so why shouldn’t I do it?’, you say ‘because you shouldn’t hurt the dog.’ But now you’re bringing in a moral judgment, which is not a fact. This is a big, big issue in philosophy. If you can’t derive all statements from facts, what’s the basis of morality, if you don’t have it coming from God, or whatever it might be? What Philippa Foot is doing in this book is she’s trying to bridge that gap, to show how an understanding of the way things are and what is good for their flourishing, from a purely natural perspective, does give you that kind of route to a moral statement. But she’s trying to make that bridge without committing that fallacy of simply jumping from an is to an ought. This is why it’s quite subtle, really. You have to accept the fact that there may well be a logical gap at some level between an is statement and an ought statement. But nonetheless, you can do a lot of work on the factual side of things, so much work that the point at which you have to make the transition to a moral statement is small enough that the only person who wouldn’t make it would be a sociopath or psychopath. There is still a logical gap to be bridged but there comes a point where, if you understand the way things are enough, then you shouldn’t really need any extra persuading that it’s good or bad to do certain things."

"I picked this because it’s very, very readable. It’s listenable to as well, because these were her 2002 BBC Reith lectures, and the book is mainly the text of those talks. I wanted to have an example of someone who is very good at bringing her philosophical skills to practical issues of public life and communicating them. In A Question of Trust she’s talking about issues of trust in public life, which is still a big issue today. There’s a lot of lack of trust in political institutions, political leaders. People have been talking about a crisis of trust for as long as we can remember. How do we increase trust? She was writing against a background where a lot of people seemed to assume the way to increase trust was to bring in mechanisms and guarantees that would reassure people that what was being said was true, that what was being done was right. What she argues is that those formal mechanisms undermine trust. So to give an example, if you’re in a long-term relationship with someone, most people would say trust is very important. The way to increase trust is not to develop systems whereby you can closely monitor what your partner is doing on a day-to-day basis, so that you have empirical, factual backup that those statements are true. In fact, that would undermine trust. It’s the idea that trust always includes elements of risk. It’s inherent to trust and you have to accept that. It’s a very rich book. It’s very brief. If you don’t know anything about philosophy, the arguments are very clear. They’re easy to follow. If you do know a bit about philosophy, you’ll be aware of all the work that’s going on under the surface. She hasn’t shown all her working. It’s wonderful that you have people who are capable of bringing their incredible knowledge, their lifetime of study of philosophy, and applying it in ways that make sense, but also explaining it in ways that people can understand. It’s good thinking in action, which we don’t see enough of, unfortunately. Indeed, and a lot of her valuable work has also not necessarily got a lot of public attention. She’s chaired at least one major commission; she’s advised on government reports, and she has been an active member in the Uk’s House of Lords, where not every member is very active. Mary Warnock was another fantastic example. She said of herself that as a philosopher, she was second or third eleven (using a cricketing analogy). That was very modest, but in a way was right, in the sense that her original contributions to philosophy weren’t many. But she did something that was even more important, which was that she chaired two major commissions on ethical issues for society: around special needs education and embryo research. She brought her philosophical expertise, brought people together, came up with these reports, which shaped policy. I think that that’s much more important work than certain people’s original contributions to the philosophical literature, which may be original, but will be footnotes to footnotes."

"This is the kind of book that I always bore people with, telling them, ‘This is great! You should read it!’ Tom Kasulis is a comparative philosopher. In other words, he works in more than one tradition and his real expertise has been in Japanese philosophy, which he’s written books on. This book came out of a series of lectures, the Gilbert Ryle lectures. Now, you can’t overgeneralize about Eastern and Western philosophy. He makes his point really strongly, that whenever you’re looking at cultural differences, it’s never binary, ‘the West is like this, the East is like that.’ But there are differences in what is foregrounded or backgrounded. He argues that what is foregrounded in one culture or tradition is backgrounded in the other, and vice versa. So these differences are real. He says that the most important difference at the moment is the ‘intimacy’ and ‘integrity’ of the title, which are actually unfortunate words, since they don’t evoke what they mean. What he means by the ‘integrity’ approach is a way of looking at the world, in which you see the individual components as being primary. What is society? It’s comprised of individuals, individuals are primary, society is the collection. What is a table? Well, the atoms and then they come together. So you can see how this way of thinking is associated a lot with reductionist science. It has been very, very fruitful, it’s worked well. He’s not denigrating or idealizing either. It’s one way of looking at the world, and it has its benefits. The other way of looking at the world is one in which you don’t focus on the elements in isolation as primary, what you’re looking at is relations, if you like. This is what the ‘intimacy’ refers to. We all know everything is related. But when you see the world primarily through the relations, it’s like a gestalt shift. You see things very differently. Typically the western individualistic, liberal tradition, encourages us to see human beings primarily as individuals. The alternative way of looking at it is to see ourselves as essentially socially situated, you can’t make sense of who you are unless you understand the culture you came from, your family members, your peers, etc. These are two different ways of thinking, and what he shows is that these different orientations manifest themselves in the way we think about all sorts of different things. I really want to stress the point is not to say that one is right and one is wrong. They both generate their insights. But if you end up thinking too much through the lens of one, we miss out things you see from the other. It’s one of those books where people say, ‘This book will change the way you think forever.’ This is a book that could do that. It’s really powerful. He explains it very well. He is an academic, I don’t think I’m being rude by saying it doesn’t have that popular style to it. But it’s very clear. And it’s so interesting. If you are unfamiliar with non-Western thought, to me, this would be almost the first book I’d suggest you read, heaven forbid, even before my own. Yes, and of all the stuff I came across researching my book, this is the one that was most important for me. It really was. It nailed it. It’s really nice when you read a book and you think it’s nailed something because philosophy is slippery, and people don’t often nail things. I think one of Dennett’s books did that too, his first book on free will, Elbow Room . It really got that idea that when people talk about free will, there are different conceptions out there and you’ve got to identify which one you’re talking about. If you do that, you’ll recognize that the kind of free will which people routinely say we don’t have, it doesn’t matter that we don’t have it, because there are other kinds of free will which are the ones worth having. That book is also one of my wife’s favourites. When I had a chance to meet Dennett once I took her copy and got him to sign it. As he was signing it, he said something like, ‘I’m fond of this book because I think with this one, I think I really did nail something.’ I think he’s right."

"You’ve got to have a curveball! Daily Rituals is one of those books where you wish you had the idea. He looks at thinkers, artists, writers, philosophers, scientists and asks how they work. Well, no, not necessarily, because he’s not interviewing them. A lot of them are dead. It’s based on people’s accounts, so some of them might be relying on their own testimony, but a lot of the time, there’s evidence of what people did. It’d be less interesting if he’d just interviewed a lot of people, and they said how they work because then you would probably get a lot of self-mythologizing of a negative or a positive aspect. Today I was listening to a radio program with a couple of writers talking about how they procrastinate so much, and they just feel sick at the sight of the keyboard. And I think, ‘You’re exaggerating, because you’ve written loads of stuff, and you also write to deadlines.’ This book highlights that when we think about how to think, we often think about the mechanics of it, or even the virtues of it. What we don’t think so much about is the social situation of it, the conditions of it. I don’t have a chapter in my book about how to lay out your office, or how to make sure you get a good night’s sleep, but, I do mention those briefly, actually, because people’s ability to think well depends a lot on those things. Now, there are certain things it depends on which are not the subject of this book, for example, around having certain material conditions, not having to look after a child 24 hours a day, and so on. That’s not part of it. But he talks about people’s habits. Of course, everybody’s different and there is lots of variety, but after a while, you do discern certain patterns. There are outliers, but the majority of these people work between three to five hours a day. And they have built into their days times where they are doing something that’s nothing to do with their work. That might be having lunches with their friends, it might be going for long walks. That makes perfect sense to me. If you’re going to do anything that involves your mind and thinking well, there’s only a limited amount of space you can give to that. In order to think well, you need to then make sure the times when you’re not doing it are giving you the opportunity to let things stew, to work away in your unconscious, in the background of your mind, or give you the rest and relaxation so when you come back, you’re rejuvenated. The advice for people who want to think well which isn’t given so much is: think about what, for you, creates the conditions where your mind is most productive and interested. It’s going to vary for different people, but one thing we have to fight against is the temptation to constantly be trying to stuff our heads. I know a lot of people who if they are traveling will always listen to a podcast or an audiobook . Now, it may work for them. They may be the kind of people who are just infinitely capable of absorbing information without limit. Lucky them. But I suspect for some of them, this is a mistake. They are trying to teach themselves things all the time and they don’t give their mind the downtime to process and think or make connections. Everyone’s different and has to work this out for themselves, but I think this is something people should be thinking about as well. I do have an ideal routine, I just don’t manage to stick to it a lot of the time. I’d wake up at sevenish, I would have a coffee and I would be doing some kind of work almost straight away. I would then have breakfast a bit later and do a bit more work. Then, by mid to late morning, I’m running out of steam. I’ll go for a walk or have a coffee. I would then come back and work a bit more before lunch. For me, the afternoon is generally quite crap. First thing in the afternoon, I’d probably want to switch off completely, and then probably do a little bit more later in the afternoon. In the evenings—I learned this the hard way—I shouldn’t work. Reading is okay but if I try to work after dinner, all it means is the next morning, I’m not as fresh. I’m not as productive. So that’s the kind of routine. I discovered it many years ago. For bizarre circumstantial reasons I won’t get into, I ended up in Salamanca working on my first proper book. I didn’t know anyone in Salamanca, it was winter, and I had no distractions. I worked in the morning, I went for a swim and then being Spain, of course, I had a long lunch. I was incredibly productive. Exactly. People have different rhythms. Now, an old neighbour of mine who is a different kind of writer, a playwright and a poet, is a lifetime night owl. He won’t even start work till 9 or 10 and then works until 3 or 4. He gets up really late, but he’s not lazy. That’s just when he works. Going back to the theme of the Daily Rituals , the number of hours per day he was working is not the eight-hour working day. This is the kind of book you dip into, it’s not something you read from cover to cover in one sitting. You could keep it in your lavatory, if you’re the kind of person who does that."

"Contemporary modern western atheism really starts, intellectually, with David Hume. He’s an interesting figure. Some people deny he was an atheist because he never came out with any statements which were unambiguous on that. They would categorise him as an agnostic. Others say that’s simply because, at the time he was writing, it was too dangerous to be open about atheism: not dangerous for his life, but it would have made things difficult had he come out as an atheist. His Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion was published after his death, perhaps for that reason. I found to my frustration that Hume’s writing on religion wasn’t available in a single volume. I’m afraid there’s a slight bit of self-plugging here, but I edited a volume of his work on religion, and that’s my first choice. Hume is the main man. Hume is where I’d like to start. What’s so wonderful about Hume is that the very reason why some people are able to claim that he’s an agnostic rather an atheist, the whole reason there is a debate, is that he is extremely measured. He’s not one of these people who just gives a strong polemic against the insanity of religious belief: he looks at the arguments and the reasons for believing or not believing, soberly. There’s no grandstanding or histrionics about it. That’s right. A lot of it is responding to the kind of arguments that were very common in his time, and actually, surprisingly, endure today: arguments that there must be a ‘First Cause,’ or that the order and design that we see in the universe must indicate some designer behind it, or that reports of miracles provide good evidence for God’s existence. He was responding to the more intellectual defences of religion that were around in his time. He picks these apart extremely effectively. It’s a good example, actually, of how you don’t need to be aggressive, and you don’t need to insult in any personal way the people you disagree with, in order to dismantle their position. Hume is much more devastating, in his way, than most of the new atheists are. It’s an interesting question whether he’s a good writer or not. I’ve always thought him a good writer, but I know some people read Hume and find him difficult. It’s partly just a question of period style. He does tend to write in very long sentences. I think that was just the typical writing of the time. In the 18th century people put a lot of commas and semicolons in, and there weren’t so many full stops. Present day readers can find that quite awkward. That’s right. This makes his dialogues far superior even to Plato’s. The Platonic dialogues can be stylistically grating because it seems that anyone who is forced into conversation with Socrates is just there to be shown how wrong they are. Most of the time, people are just saying ‘Yes, Socrates, I agree, Socrates,’ or they’re falling straight into his traps. In Hume’s Dialogues , you get very strong versions of the arguments on both sides. If you were to read the Dialogues —without knowing in advance which side Hume was on—there are certainly places where you wouldn’t be sure whether or not this book was ultimately going to be a defence of religion. Remember that it only takes one good argument to prove God’s existence. You could dismiss several arguments as insufficient to establish that, and still conclude with one that was good enough. [Spoiler alert: he leaves all the traditional arguments for God’s existence in tatters]. That’s absolutely Hume’s principle. I don’t want to summarise it and make it too crude, but what he’s really showing is that none of the reasons people have to suppose that there is a God, is strong enough to establish any such thing. So what you’re left with is the position where you don’t have sufficient grounds to believe. Now, that doesn’t mean you’ve proved there is no such thing, but in the absence of good grounds to believe that something exists, then your default position is to assume that it doesn’t until proven otherwise. People often say, ‘You can’t prove a negative’ — that you can’t prove that God doesn’t exist, and therefore that’s another reason why you can’t be an atheist. That’s a misunderstanding of the ‘can’t prove a negative principle.’ We understand in all normal circumstances that to believe that something exists in the absence of any good reason that it does exist is irrational. They get it the wrong way round. It’s not that you need to prove that something doesn’t exist. It’s rather that if you show there’s an absence of reasons to think it does exist, then you have no use for that hypothesis. I agree with you. It’s a much misunderstood principle. I suppose the point is that there are circumstances when it’s impossible to do all the checking necessary to establish the negative. So if we’re going to prove, let’s say, that the Ark of the Covenant isn’t buried somewhere under the sand of the Sahara Desert, it’s impossible to prove that. The Sahara’s too big, so for those practical reasons you can’t. But you’re right, when it’s a small enough area to look in—a pocket say—it’s easy to establish a negative. It’s easy to establish that there’s no elephant in your fridge, and if you end up saying there might be an invisible and intangible elephant, then you’re being silly. Now, there are so many different definitions and understandings of what God is, that there’s always room to turn round and say, ‘Well, it’s true that you haven’t established the existence of God, we can’t prove it, but there are plenty of places that God could be hiding.’ From that point of view, you can’t get the decisive argument. “Without God, there’s nothing to fall back on as an authority, nothing to tell us what the right way to live is.” You have to go back, again, to that Humean principle of proportioning your belief to the evidence, and think about the right kind of evidence for what it is you’re looking for. If you believe some divine, benevolent ruler of the universe exists, there are certain things you’d expect to follow from that. There are certain things you might expect to see in the universe if that were true. Then, when you find that those things don’t obtain, it’s reasonable to conclude that it probably doesn’t exist. The fact that it doesn’t prove it 100% is a huge red herring because there are so many things the existence of which you can’t prove with absolute certainty. You have to live and make your choices on the basis of what seems most probable."

"Serious Sartreans get quite annoyed with this book because it’s a very accessible, easy-to-read, non-technical, public lecture. Many Sartreans think that unless you’ve read Being and Nothingness from cover to cover and pored over the footnotes, you don’t really understand Sartre. For them, people like me who say, ‘I like Sartre, I like Existentialism and Humanism ’ are a bit like people who say ‘I really like Wagner, that ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ is a great tune,’ but have never sat through the Ring Cycle. Let’s put that aside, because it is a great essay, irrespective of how representative of his thought it is. The reason I wanted to include it is that in contemporary Britain, atheists and humanist organisations are keen to stress the cheerful side of atheism. The British Humanist Association, like other humanist associations worldwide, uses a happy human symbol. There’s this idea that because so many people have this misconception that life without God is dark, meaningless and without purpose, you’ve got to emphasise the extent to which joy, happiness, meaning, and morality are possible without a belief in God. Of course I do think that’s true, but there’s also a danger of overstating it. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter What you see in Sartre represents that tradition in thought pointing to troubling aspects of accepting a world without God. There are difficulties involved. Primarily, it’s this issue around responsibility. Without God, there’s nothing to fall back on as an authority, nothing to tell us what the right way to live is, or what the correct moral code is, nothing to show us what makes life meaningful. We really do have to make that decision for ourselves. That profound responsibility generates anxiety, anguish and despair, Sartre says. I find this absence more comical than tragic — though it has its tragic side. You see the same basic, existentialist ideas in the Monty Python films, and the appropriate responses there are not anguish, abandonment and despair, but ironic humour. Life is absurd, so you laugh. That seems about right. Whereas for Sartre, life is absurd, and therefore you go ‘oh my (non-existent) God’ and put your head in your hands. It is important to bear in mind that there are difficulties, there are problems, and for all that I agree that meaning and value are possible without God, the thought that this is all there is—and everything that matters to us is going to be extinguished, and in a moment I could die, and nothing would be left behind, and everything I worked for would just disappear, from my point of view— is a disturbing thought. Yes. I realise I’ve included this book even though there is very little in it I agree with 100 per cent. On that point, and many others here and elsewhere, he overstates it. I don’t think when you choose for yourself, you choose for all humankind. I suppose what he means is that when you choose for yourself, you endorse something as at least in the possible range for all of the rest of mankind, unless you’re making a complete exception of yourself. So there is a claim to universality there implied by choice. Now, of course, most of the time the rest of the world isn’t even going to notice, so that doesn’t really matter. But I think it is true— and this is where, perhaps, you get some moral seriousness in an atheistic world view that some people claim to be lacking—that simply by virtue of the need for consistency your choices inevitably express values which go beyond your own preferences. So, for example, if someone tucks into a factory-farmed pig, they’re implying that this is acceptable, that it’s all right that we live in a society where animal welfare is given so little respect. That’s right. The student wants an answer, and Sartre doesn’t give it to him. Sartre says, basically, you have to make up your own mind, and what he’s trying to get over to the student is that he can’t abdicate his own responsibility by choosing any kind of authority. What’s interesting about that is—although I’ve chosen it as an atheist book—is that I actually think Sartre overstates the importance of the absence of God for existentialism, because that same point about that difficulty of choice and responsibility you get before Sartre in Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard, in his Fear and Trembling , talks about Abraham’s decision, about whether or not he’s going to go ahead with the sacrifice of his son Isaac, as requested by God. Now, why should this be troubling? Some people say you do what God tells you to do. But in Kierkegaard’s telling, even if you believe in God, and even if you believe that God has command, ultimately, you’re the only person responsible for your decision. So, as far as Abraham is concerned, is God trying to test him? Woody Allen does a good skit on this, where God is very cross with Abraham for going ahead with the sacrifice, and Abraham protests, ‘Well, I’m just showing how obedient I am, God.’ God replies, ‘No, what you’re showing is you’ve got no moral fibre, and that if someone tells you to do something in a booming, modulating voice, then you’ll do anything.’ That’s actually a really important point. Absolutely. It seems a bit odd for me in the text that, at points, he suggests that the crucial thing for existentialism is that it takes seriously the idea that there is no God, but much of what he actually says doesn’t depend on that at all. Even if you have a religious belief, you may still have this issue. Certainly at this point in his career, he did overestimate the extent to which we are free to do what we want. As I understand it, Simone de Beauvoir had a more realistic view of human freedom, coming at this from the perspective of a woman of her time. She saw that in order to realise their potential freedom, many women had to have the shackles of patriarchy removed, and some women themselves didn’t realise their own capabilities, because they were so acculturated to believe that they had to fulfil certain roles. I think a more realistic view is that it’s unrealistic to expect people to be able to release themselves purely by force of their own will. You need other people or social structures to be different in order for you to really realise this. Then, even once you’re beyond that, once you’re seeing things as clearly as possible, there are huge constraints on our choices. He doesn’t really take those constraints seriously, in Existentialism and Humanism at least, and as I understand it this is something perhaps he did struggle with more in his later work, but I’m afraid I’m not the one to tell you exactly how he resolved the issue."

"I brought this book in because when I was writing my book on atheism, Atheism: A Very Short Introduction , I was looking for some history. There was very little written about that. It may be a little bit different now, but this was the only decent book that I could find. It looks at atheism and its precursors in different periods: the pre-Socratic period, the Hellenistic period, and then going up to the Renaissance and Middle Ages. I’m not one of these people who can retain much memory of books, I don’t remember a lot of facts from them. I know from talking to others that a lot of people are like this. Most of them are a bit embarrassed about it, and don’t like to admit it. We all assume that other people are much better retainers of what they’ve read than we are ourselves. But what I do get from books, apart from information, is this: a good book changes the way I think in some way. I may not remember exactly what detail of the book did that, I may even misremember details of the book, but if it changes how I think, and informs my views, then it’s done something worthwhile. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Thrower’s book changed my view of the history of atheism in several ways. One was that it made clear to me that overt atheism is a reasonably recent phenomenon: it didn’t really emerge until quite late in the Middle Ages. There was a French priest, Jean Meslier—a play was written about his life a few years ago, quite an interesting one—and he’s held by some people to be the first overt atheist. He died in 1729. Baron d’Holbach is the other person who’s often claimed to be the first overt atheist. It’s quite striking, that you can’t unambiguously claim that anyone was ever atheist until that late, and interesting in itself. Going back to Hellenistic periods, it does seem that most thinkers believed in a supernatural world. You read Plato’s Dialogues , and Plato often talks about the gods, and the oracles. Some people— because I think they want to believe that Plato was a paradigm of rationality—assume this was a sop to the masses, but many scholars, perhaps the majority, think that’s just not true. Plato did believe those things: everybody did. Again, some people believe that educated Romans, the Roman aristocracy, were at least agnostic about the gods, but thought it important that the masses believed in them for Machiavellian reasons. That sounds implausible. It’s curious that open atheism of the kind we recognise is so recent a phenomenon. But then, in other ways, perhaps it isn’t curious. Even Richard Dawkins has argued that before Darwin you could be an intellectually respectable religious believer. We simply didn’t understand enough about the way the world worked to be able to make sense of it without assuming some kind of supernatural agency. Atheism is only really something that becomes intellectually complete and robust at a time when you can understand the world with a high degree of scientific sophistication."

"It is the spell of religious belief. Broadly speaking, it is the spell of supernatural belief. The reason I wanted to include this was that we have had this recent phenomenon dubbed the New Atheism which is, of course, like all these labels, a label put upon people from the outside looking in, rather than a self-proclaimed one. The New Atheism has been a very interesting movement, but one which I’m, at the very least, ambivalent about. Of the so-called ‘four horsemen’ of the New Atheist apocalypse— Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens—Dennett is far and away the most sober, rational, and fair-minded of them. If people want to read a New Atheist book, they should read this one. That would be a good way of trying to counter some of those myths that contemporary atheists are all just very cross, angry, and belligerent. This is a charge often levelled at Richard Dawkins: the criticism that his target is a view of God as an old man in the sky, pulling the levers, controlling the weather and so on — that he fails to appreciate that there are many more subtle ways of understanding what God is. Dawkins’s answer is that he doesn’t need to attack more sophisticated views, because the inventions of Oxbridge theologians bear no relation to what most people think. Dennett, in contrast, is much more sympathetic and understanding about different views of religion and the nature of God. What he’s trying to do is delve beneath the reasons people give for their beliefs, and try and understand them in a way that makes sense of them as a natural phenomenon. That doesn’t make them true, of course, he doesn’t believe there is a God. But he tries to understand why religious belief is so prevalent, and to diagnose its causes."

"Yes, it’s Nick Spencer’s Atheists: the Origin of the Species . I did want to include a book which was more critical of atheism, because reading lots of books that bolster your own worldview isn’t a very interesting way of going about things. Often the most interesting books are those which challenge your position intelligently. They’re in rather short supply, I have to say. There are books which counter the more belligerent forms of atheism straightforwardly, and others I find quite contentious. I like this one. I don’t agree with its conclusions, but Spencer is quite good at not overstating things. He raises some important questions. A lot of people have tried to explain the rise of science itself, and indeed, the worldview that it gives rise to, as deeply rooted in religion. Religion played a huge role in the Scientific Revolution: it wasn’t simply the thing that was blown away by it. I think that’s fair and true, but it doesn’t follow from that that religion should still stand at the end of it. It is an anti-atheist book. He does point out that there are various atheisms, and that’s one reason why it’s a more interesting book than many others, which talk about atheism in the singular. Just as we know there are many ways of being religious, there are many ways of being an atheist. Ultimately, Spencer thinks it is a dead end, that religion will come back and will dominate. Obviously I don’t find those arguments ultimately convincing, so I can’t end up recommending this book on the grounds that I agree with its conclusions or its arguments. But I do think that it presents challenges and arguments which deserve a response. “In some ways, becoming an atheist doesn’t necessarily change things as much as you might think.” So often I find that when people make criticisms of atheist positions, all you can do is point out the fundamental misunderstandings that they have of atheism, or the rather simplistic fallacies that their argument relies on. Whereas, when Spencer makes a point about atheism, nine times out of ten it’s something that there is a response to, but it’s not so obvious, you have to think and to engage with what he’s written. He maintains that ‘the history of atheism is best seen as a series of disagreements about authority, rather than primarily about the existence, or otherwise, of God.’ His point is that to look at, for example, the French Revolution, and to see it as fundamentally a theological or philosophical dispute about whether God exists or not, is hugely misleading, because it was really a question about power and authority, and where it lies. There’s a great deal of truth in that, and it would be useful to look at that, but at the same time, it’s not an either-or. That’s the fundamental point. So it’s true, you can see how the development of atheism did include such power struggles, and they were very important. But behind all this, there are still claims about whether God exists or not, and arguments about whether God exists or not. He adds another dimension to the debate, and enriches it, but doesn’t ultimately change the final conclusions. That a good question, because, in some ways, becoming an atheist doesn’t necessarily change things as much as you might think. It depends partly on what kind of religiosity you escaped from. A very common experience people have is that when they come from a very moralistic, puritanical, strict religious background, they have all sorts of fears, hang ups, and repressions around sexuality. Giving up the religious belief frees them in their sexuality, in some way. That doesn’t mean they go from being chaste virgins to libertines necessarily—although sometimes this is what happens—but nevertheless there is a fundamental change there. That’s not something that was a particularly important factor for me. There was no big overnight change. But there was a gradual shift to seeing the value, and meaning, and purpose in the here and now. By the here and now, I don’t mean the shallow sense of right this minute, right this second, what can I have now, now, now, but the deep-rooted belief that death is the end, and that the awareness that life is all we have nurtures an appreciation of life and the world. That can become a shallow kind of hedonism where you’re just grabbing after the next experience, but it doesn’t have to. It can produce a richer sensitivity to people and things around us. It’s not an overnight transformation, but the journey that I have taken, and in which atheism has definitely played a large part, is one in which I try to have a greater sensitivity to the importance of the here and now, not in a selfish way. Issues of social justice, inequality and fairness have become more important. When refugees wash up dead on the shores of Europe, you can’t have that reassurance in the back of your mind that they’ve now entered the bosom of their creator, and everything is going to be all right. Far from it: theirs were lives that were hard, and difficult, and were ended prematurely. All we can do is try and stop other people having to live and die in that way in the future. A greater appreciation of life is one result of atheism. Although that sounds very positive, it does make life bittersweet, because you know everything is passing, and nothing’s ever permanent. There’s an awareness of the coming dusk, always there, while we appreciate the sunshine."