Simon Blackburn interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 21st April 2009

0:09:07 Born near Bristol in 1944; remember both sets of grandparents; mother's parents lived in the Pennines, near Barnard Castle; my grandfather had worked in the lead mines up in Weardale, but then had worked with horses as a groom; mother's mother was a school teacher and had intellectual ambitions for her daughter, her only child; there was a strong non-conformist element although my mother was not religious; on my father's side, my grandfather was the Managing Director of the Sunderland and South Shields Water Company and was a civil engineer; he was clearly very clever as shown by the prize books he won; my father also became a civil engineer and worked for the same company; my mother was ambitious but my father was not; he was a gentle man and mildly dyslexic; his spelling was absolutely appalling; it was one of the things that gave him a forgiving attitude to life and people adored him; mother saw intellectual achievement as a way of advancing socially; she was pleased to get out of the rural backwater; she met my father when he came up to work on the Burnham Dam which was built in the Pennines just north of where she lived; she was keen that her children progress becoming professional people; I had a sister and younger brother

5:19:05 Have no real memory of pre-school years except of a green car; I believe my father had such a car until about 1948-9; I can distinctly remember going to school at the age of five and being singled out for being able to spell the word 'beautiful'; by then my parents had moved back to the north-east; my father had previously worked with the West Gloucester Water Company but then got a job as distribution engineer in his father's company; the prep school was called Tunstall School, a day school, and stayed there until I went on to Clifton College; I remember one traumatic event which has blighted my life ever since, being told not to join in singing 'The Bells of Aberdovey' because I had such a terrible voice; looking back, I now think that was not the way to treat a child who needed help; it has always been a matter of regret to me that I never became very musical; also remember being utterly bored by Latin and that probably contributed to not being a very good linguist; on the science side it was all positive; we had a wonderful mathematics teacher, Mr Cheshire, the brother of Leonard; he was a commanding presence and a gifted teacher; I used to play a lot with a boy of my own age on his father's farm, but was never taught to observe the countryside around me; I was pretty hopeless at games; I did not like football but quite enjoyed cricket; when I went away to school we played rugby and I enjoyed that much more than either of them; I do enjoy listening to classical music but it has never influenced my work; I am fond of painting and get enormous pleasure from looking at it, particularly the European tradition

14:27:10 My sister is older than me and she had been sent to Clifton High School for Girls when my parents still lived in Bristol; somehow that gave them an affinity with Clifton and they put me in for a scholarship at eleven; I was lucky enough to get one; it was a very good school, it treated me well, and I enjoyed my time there; some of the teaching was excellent; they did nothing very much to rectify my linguistic incapacities but the science side was good, and I specialized in maths, physics and chemistry; there was a man called Davies who was a wonderful chemistry teacher despite the dullness of the syllabus; physics is generally very badly taught now, and I am sure it was then; the big questions were never answered satisfactorily; it contributed in me to a gradual drift away from the hard sciences into the arts; I discovered an aptitude for shooting and won competitions at Bisley; I never had the ambition to act; had a friend who had a technical gift, made radios and a tape recorder, but I realized this gift was beyond me; it was part of the uncertainty I had about the hard sciences so when I took the Cambridge entrance I was determined to leave them

20:58:02 At Clifton I did have a vaguely religious year when I first went there; I was moderately homesick and a bit unhappy to begin with so the consolations of religion have some appeal; the school had a chapel so a friend and I decided that we would get confirmed and started going to classes run by the school chaplain, Rev. Hon. Oliver Twistleton-Wickham-Fiennes, whom I didn't much like; at the first class he asked us where we had been baptised; I didn't know that I had been baptised, in fact I hadn't as my parents had no religious belief at all; my friend had been baptised in a little church in the foothills of the Himalaya where his father was a District Officer; the chaplain thought this a ridiculous answer and was angry; after this flagrant injustice we gave up the idea; didn't take long for this rather superficial interest to dissipate; by the time I was fifteen I was a committed atheist and I have not changed since; I am a rather strange atheist because I don't really believe in religious belief, and I don't really believe in religious experiences either

25:18:09 Clifton was very Cambridge-orientated, especially for scientists, so I was sent to Trinity; failed to get a scholarship but was offered a place; in the sixth form at Clifton we had a token reading hour for scientist; for one term, a very good master, Martin Scott, who later went to Winchester, took us through Moore's 'Principia Ethica' which was a book he thought we ought to know about; I rather liked it and had a sense that I might like philosophy, but when I came to the admissions interview I had intended to change to English; Dr Vivian, an historian, who conducted the interview, a fearsome character, asked why I wanted to change from natural sciences; he said I would not like English but that I should read moral sciences; I asked him what it was and he said they would send me a reading list; they did and I found it exactly the right thing for me; the questions that I never got answered such as "what is energy"? I learnt were seriously asked by philosophers, so it seemed the best bits of science without the drudgery; whether Vivian was just lucky or had got an insight, I don't know, but it was  right for me

30:28:04 At Cambridge the great influence on all of us in Trinity was Casimir Lewy; he was a Polish Jew who had left Germany just in time before the Second World War; he lost either all or nearly all of his family; he was a charismatic teacher with an enormous influence on a whole generation of philosophy students in Trinity - Ian  Hacking, Edward Craig and myself, Crispin Wright - many of us became academics; he had the great gift of knowing how to dangle standards just in front of your nose so you would go away feeling that you had done well but could do better; I have always thought that a great gift - he was not discouraging, but never left you complacent either; he got a lot of work out of us but it was a pleasure; the moral sciences faculty as it was then called - not until Bernard Williams came here that it changed to philosophy - was a little bit of a mad house; John Wisdom and Richard Braithwaite were the two Chairs, C.D. Broad was still a presence at Trinity and I got to meet him quite a lot as I was on his staircase; Wisdom was extraordinary - a little, rather wizened man, with a sepulchral voice, and a completely unconventional teaching style; looking back I think he was probably disillusioned with philosophy so he didn't have any ambition to teach a syllabus; he would come in and ask bizarre questions and there was a certain amount of theatre about it; Edward Craig swears he was in a class when Wisdom came in and slumped on the dais and groaned about it being far too difficult, then flapped his hands against his forehead and supposed he was a poacher with a silent dog whistle and asked how you would tell the difference between a malfunctioning dog whistle and a disobedient dog; at least it was a lecture that was remembered, which can't be said for many of our lectures; Richard Braithwaite was pretty eccentric; I remember one meeting with the Moral Sciences Club where his wife was sitting in the front row, Jonathan Bennett, one of the lecturers, was behind her, and the speaker was a saintly man, William Kneale from Oxford; he was talking about the logical problem of negative existentials - how can you say that something doesn't exist because the word used to refer to it has no meaning with nothing to refer to; Kneale chose as an example the non-existence of witches; every time he mentioned this, Jonathan Bennett pointed down at Mrs Braithwaite, Margaret Masterman, in front of him; another, less than dignified episode; I never had much to do with her but she lured people into some slightly dotty Christian sect that met in a caravan; Braithwaite was still pretty hale and hearty by the time I left; he retired about 1966-7 when Bernard Williams came; in 1969 I started my job in Oxford; Dorothy Emmett looked after the Braithwaites until they died; I was still here when Bernard arrived; I came up to Cambridge in 1962, graduated in 1965, I was then a research student for a couple of years and in 1967 got a fellowship at Churchill College where I stayed for a year and a half, then went to Oxford; Bernard was remarkable and a breath of fresh air to Cambridge; he was very smart; I think there was quite a deep pessimism in him and had no very exalted ambitions either for philosophy or the human race; although he was probably best known as a moral philosopher he had no illusions about what could be achieved by it; I think he thought that political philosophy was important, as was reflection; he had the most cutting tongue and would tell scurrilous stories about people that were incredibly funny; in spite of the pessimism he was also absolutely exhilarating to be with; I also think that he had a kindly streak which wasn't always apparent; after I had been in Oxford for a couple of years I was invited back to the Moral Sciences Club and gave a paper; Elizabeth Anscombe had not long been in Cambridge and she was being absolutely appalling; she arrived late with an entourage, and one of her daughters rather ostentatiously stroked her mother's hair all the time the talk was going on, and there would be little muttered whispers - an awful kind of one-upmanship; by the end I was rather despondent as I had done nothing to offend her, but Bernard immediately took me back to the Provost's lodge and opened a bottle of whiskey and spent an hour detailing Miss Anscombe's infirmities and faults, which cheered me up

44:12:24 Went to start a PhD; supervisor was mostly Casimir Lewy though I think it was rather unhealthy; he was very protective of his Trinity people and liked to keep them; it was partly because he had running feuds with his other colleagues so he didn't like the idea of any of them corrupting us; because of the topic of my thesis I saw quite a lot of Richard Braithwaite - the topic was the so-called problem of induction, the Humean question, on why we feel entitled to extrapolate uniformities of nature beyond the regions of space and time; it is a problem about the reliability of natural laws; there are various approaches to it, one of them was probabilistic, and Braithwaite was the man for probability theory; he was very helpful although it was not one of his central interests; Casimir Lewy always had useful things to say even if it was not his own topic of interest which was in logic and the philosophy of language; think it was part of the climate of the time that Cambridge was very introverted; the only one of us who broke out and went to Oxford for his PhD was Crispin Wright; I think that was the right thing to do; in America it is almost compulsory to go somewhere else to graduate school, and it is very unlikely that the institution will then give you a job when you finish your PhD; I think Cambridge is less so now; Cambridge in the 1960s was partly coasting on the reputation of Wittgenstein, Moore and Russell; with hindsight I should have been packed off to where there were serious philosophers of science - Chicago, Minnesota or Pittsburgh; I did not go to America until I had been in Oxford for some years

49:03:01 I came to Hume through working on the problem of induction as he gave the classic exposition of it; I graduated without ever having read a book which was written before the nineteenth century; logic was the be all and end all, sometimes called analytical philosophy carried forward by Russell and Moore at Cambridge; the problem of induction was a strange choice for a Cambridge PhD; when I went back and read Hume I found him a wonderful writer, partly because I have always had a sensitivity to the writing of philosophy as well as what is said; over the years I have made deeper acquaintance with Hume and have never had cause to reverse my initial admiration; Hume was looked down on in those days because he was thought to have a naive philosophy of language; he has come back in, partly because logic and philosophy of language have lost some of their prestige, partly because Hume is seen as the first great naturalist in British philosophy, resolute in seeing the human being as just another animal, and seeing the intellectual and cognitive processes as natural events following patterns and rules; that is now the dominant tone in psychology, cognitive science and physiology these days; he gives marvellous quasi-anthropological reconstructions in game theory, in things like the emergence of cooperation and convention, and seen as absolutely pioneering now; Wittgenstein never read Hume and more or less dismissed him, Elizabeth Anscombe completely dismissed him, but I think that would be impossible now; later on in my career I started working on moral philosophy although it had been an interest before I left Cambridge because I remember discussing it with Braithwaite; the nature moral philosophy has since become something I have written about extensively

54:21:11 The fact that Hume was sceptical about whether God existed chimed with me; Hume is cunning, an economical thinker who never tries to prove more than he needs; I think on the question of religion it is famous that he never described himself as an atheist and in some writings he appears to disown the term; this puzzles people because 'The Dialogues', especially concerning natural religion, which he only allowed to be published after his death, and perhaps the greatest sceptical tract in British philosophy; 'The Dialogues' has three main protagonists, Demea, representative of a mystical wing of philosophy - God that is infinite, perfect, eternal, beyond space and time, Cleanthes who wants a much more anthropomorphic concept of the deity, one who designs things and makes things happen, and has emotions, so the God of popular religion, then there is Philo who is completely sceptical about religion who is undoubtedly Hume himself; what Philo does for much of 'The Dialogues' is to set Demea and Cleanthes at each other's throat because basically you can't have both the God of the philosophers, perfect, and somebody directing the sun and blowing walls down for Joshua; at various points in 'The Dialogues' Cleanthes says to Demea that he cannot distinguish his mystical god from atheism, and Demea tells Cleanthes that he can't distinguish his anthropomorphic god from atheism either; Philo just sits back and watches them; when it comes to his own views you can see very clearly why he doesn't have to call himself an atheist; if you call yourself a theist or an atheist you think there is a question; at the end of 'The Dialogue' Philo contrives it that these two have lost the question, there is no question because they have got an 'it' about which nothing can be said; agreeing with either suggests you are collaborating with people that know they have got something that they are talking about, and Hume has destroyed that because the 'it' turns out to have no consequences, so it is left inert; that is I think where Hume stands - he does not have to express belief or disbelief without calling himself an atheist which would suggest there was a discussable question; it is an extremely clever book; professional philosophers like myself tear our hair out when we see the way these things are debated in the press - new atheists like Dawkins and Hitchens, defenders of the faith, like a bunch of theologians

Second Part

0:09:07 Have not read Dawkins book but he is not a very good philosopher, and despises philosophy because it is not science and then pontificates; a good example is the whole metaphor of the selfish gene where he suggests we can rebel against our genes which is just nonsense; it is the kind of thing that religious people believe as they think of the soul as an independent locus of agency apart from the mind brain system; if a first year student wrote that in a philosophy of mind paper they would be thrown out of the university; as far as I understand the religious issue the thing that seems to me so awful is that he seems to think it is purely a question of doctrine and belief; he thinks there is a question; Schopenhauer put it beautifully saying that the allegorical and mysterious natures of religions were essential to them, that we are not in the domain of belief but in the domain of practise; the practice includes contradictory elements; many social psychologists think religions have an adaptive function, enabling groups to coordinate better, and to separate insiders from outsiders; some evidence that groups that are cemented together by shared religious practices last much longer compared with groups that have none; its prevalence in countries like the USA where other more traditional forms of social bonding have never had time to form so they need some kind of shared practices; all that side of it as I understand completely escapes Dawkins which means he is not really qualified to think about the issue at all; do have sympathy with religion; if one separated these practises from the issue of cognition, belief, nature of a supernatural reality, then the practises stand or fall as other human practices do; religions, being human constructs sometimes express wonderful things - Chartres or Taj Mahal, sometimes terrible things  - Spanish Inquisition, the way different groups treated each other in Northern Ireland or the Middle East; though a Fellow of Trinity, I never go to the Chapel as I have no religious inclinations, though I would not refuse to go; it would be a little harder as Master as nobody would take my going to Chapel as more than a fairly empty ritual, but if I were Master presiding over it I would take that more as an endorsement which I wouldn't necessarily want to do

7:07:01 Went to Oxford as a Fellow and Tutor in philosophy at Pembroke College from 1969 until 1990; think it compared rather badly with Cambridge in one respect; the faculty here for all its oddities was at least geographically coherent; Oxford has many more philosophers than Cambridge where many colleges have two, and almost all have one, so between fifty and seventy at any one time whereas there are only a dozen in Cambridge; in Oxford there are joint courses - PPE, greats, etc. - whereas at Cambridge you only read philosophy; the emphasis on college teaching meant a lot of the fellows in philosophy were stuck in their college and virtually never saw anybody from any other college because the conditions of a fellowship were fairly heavy on teaching; fortunately I had a group of friends and over time I met some of the great philosophers  of the previous generation, but I think in a way it was professionally isolated; at the same time I had married and had a family so was not isolated in that way; college life in both Oxford and Cambridge can be a snare where college commitments can play havoc with your research; Oxford took some getting used to and I didn't much like the style; found it a smarmy place with a lot of complacent people, a very introverted donnish society; on teaching, I pretty much enjoy any conversation on philosophy, so enjoy supervising bright students; I find lecturing quiet easy; there is an interchange between my teaching and research; sure that if I had suffered the catastrophe of a fellowship at All Souls, something that doesn't require any teaching, I would have simply gone to sleep; teaching and conversation to me is an essential catalyst to philosophical thought; on the other hand teaching can get in the way if you have got an idea and want to work it out; in Oxford I was teaching frequently for fifteen to twenty hours a week; have had a lot of graduate students over the years, but enjoy it less than undergraduate teaching because I am very conscious that it is an investment of time as you get to know them better and are more involved with them, and for longer

15:54:02 In 1990 I left Oxford for the US; in 1984 I published a book called 'Spreading the Word' on the philosophy of language which was well received; I became the Editor of 'Mind' and as a result I was getting a lot of graduate students wanting to work with me; 'Mind' received about three hundred and fifty papers a year of which we published about forty, so a huge refereeing job which I felt I had to do most of myself; it began to take its toll and by the late eighties I felt a combination of things; rather cross that Oxford never considered the work involved with 'Mind' so there was no teaching relief; I think I felt under-appreciated in Oxford; the Thatcher years were putting the humanities under threat and I began to get offers from the US; my wife and I went to look at the University of Michigan and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and we chose the latter, partly because its climate was much nicer than Michigan; I spent ten years there; it was an enormous relief as far as work load was concerned, and a very nice atmosphere; it was a faculty and within one building so there was no sense of isolation that there had been in Oxford; I was very happy there and we would probably have stayed as our children went to university there; my wife was pulled back because of her mother's decline and when Cambridge made me an offer we came back here; my wife works as an editor for Oxford University Press having started at Cambridge as a copy editor; at Oxford she worked as a school teacher for a little while before joining the Press; she read English here under the Leavises; she continued working for the Press in the US before setting up her own book production business until it was undercut by the low prices for book production in the Far East

22:19:19 I think the best academic book I have written in the last fifteen years 'Ruling Passions' which is an exploration of human motivation, particularly moral motivation, in the light of game theory, questions of objectivity, truth, knowledge; I became well known for quasi-realism; if ethics were just imperatives - do this and don't do that - then it becomes a mystery why we actually express ourselves in ways which make it look like ethics are much more a question of fact - e.g. its wrong to torture people; one possible response is to say we just deceive ourselves, a popular position in the 1970s; I thought you could have both of these, the practical imperative, but also not an accident that we have the subject-predicate form and talk about truth, fact, knowledge, objectivity etc.; the trick was to keep these two parts together although most writers thought it couldn't be done; I tried to produce some models of language in which it could be done; the basic idea was that we needed a moral predicate - good, bad, that ought or ought not to be done - in order to facilitate discussion; if I give a command you can either do it or not, that is about it; if I say you ought to, then you can or not but also argue about it; in a sense I saw moral propositions not as reflecting the mysterious world of moral fact, that I don't believe it, but as imaginary focuses facilitating discussion, coordination, and the general negotiation of moral positions in social life; this seemed to me a way of having the best of both worlds and that has attracted attention, some favourable and some hostile,  that has kept me busy for quite a long time

27:44:19 Have always enjoyed introducing people to philosophy, wanting to share my own enthusiasm for it; 'Think' was the first introductory book that I wrote and is my favourite; probably it was the best introduction to philosophy since Russell's 'Problems of Philosophy' in 1912; I also wrote the 'Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy' which was quite a task; philosophy is such a personal subject that you can't just rely on anybody to write an article or entry; I did have people to do extensive checking but I did write it all myself; now I am trying to get going a set of thoughts about the pragmatist tradition of philosophy; think that philosophers have been obsessed by our cognitive powers and there is a tendency to think of that just in terms of reception of fact, so the mind as the mirror of nature as Richard Rorty put it; there is the counter-culture of which Rorty was a member which said the mind was for doing other things than reflecting nature; nature does not need a copy but active engagement; that is the dispute between representationalists and pragmatists; rather as with ethics I like to try and find common ground; it is not original to try to have the best of both of those but I am not sure that anyone has done it as I would like to see it done and that is what I would really like to get on with when Cambridge allows me to

32:45:00 On working, a thought never darts into an unprepared mind; in my case that means conversation, teaching, sometimes reading; I do perhaps have a northern bloody-minded streak that when I read or hear something that doesn't quite ring true, that sets me of to try to do better; Rorty's books are quite often the spur; I don't really believe in the philosopher strolling in Trinity gardens and having great thoughts; on the other hand, when you are on the chase and have a chapter that is proving knotty and interesting, then thoughts can pop into your mind; I enjoy writing; just before coming to Cambridge I taught myself to touch-type so I have always been a very fast typist; when the words are coming I can really work very fast; wrote the dissertation for the Churchill fellowship in two weeks, and the actual writing of my PhD took only a little longer; once it is there, getting it down in just enjoyable; I do rewrite, possibly more as I have got older; my writing style was awful when I started my career and I think my wife influenced me to improve; finally, feel very grateful to Dr Vivian for putting me on the life's path that he did because it has been a wonderful career