Nigel Warburton on Introductions to Philosophy

How did you first become interested in philosophy?

I can remember as a very young child asking the question, "How does a baby learn to speak?" I wasn't really satisfied with the answer my mother gave me – that you just point to things and say their names. I'm not sure I could answer the question now, but it was certainly of philosophical interest. As a teenager, I also picked out Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy from the local public library, which was one of the great inspirations for me. The library, that is, rather than the book. I think it's the route out of suburbia for a lot of people. It opened up different sorts of reading for me. I would walk several miles to the local library and take out as many books as I could. Inevitably, sooner or later I got some philosophy books, along with all sorts of weird and wonderful ones.

What did you make of the Russell book?

It wasn't the book I needed at that age. I've since tried to write that book a couple of times, but I don't know if I've succeeded. It was a bit slow-moving for me and I didn't get beyond the pre-Socratics, who didn't really stimulate me.

So did you really get into the subject at university?

I actually went to Bristol University to study psychology, but I became a bit disillusioned with it and dropped out. After a year out from university, that I mostly spent working as a car park attendant, the decisive factor for me about going back to university to study philosophy rather than psychology was that there was a clash between the two courses. I was very interested in reading Sartre and I wouldn't have been able to study Sartre's Being and Nothingness in psychology. That clash made me realise how much I wanted to understand that book, or at least parts of it. That was my one opportunity, I felt, because it isn't the kind of book you can make sense of on your own. So I switched to philosophy.

It seems a lot of Anglo-American philosophers are drawn into the subject as teenagers by their encounters with existentialism, and especially Sartre. But often, after a certain number of years of study, they come to strongly disagree with Sartre's philosophy. Did that happen to you?

I don't think you have to agree with the philosophers you read. It's almost better if you disagree with them because then you have some kind of dialogue – you don't read them in a passive way. I find Sartre stimulating, difficult and frustrating. His later writings are unreadable, driven by his use of the drug speed and written with no concessions to the reader. So the fact that I disagree with huge amounts of what Sartre said doesn't mean that he wasn't an amazing and important thinker to me.

Sartre was also a novelist, and his novels are often described as philosophical. Do you think novels and novelists can really engage in philosophy, or is that only possible if you're a professional academic philosopher?

I think professional philosophers often like to make their subject smaller than it really is by setting arbitrary limits. As far as I'm concerned, philosophy is any human enterprise that involves critical thought about basic questions, like how we should live, what is the nature of reality and so on. Those questions can be asked seriously in all kinds of forms. So I don't see the subject as restricted to nerdy philosophical papers in refereed journals. Some of the most important contributions have been literary. If you think of classical philosophy, you have Plato's very literary dialogues, and Lucretius's On The Nature of Things is a poem! Some parts of TS Eliot's poems are very philosophical. Kierkegaard is a poetic writer who uses fictions, and Nietzsche uses aphorisms and poetry. They're all philosophers.

Do you think, given the success of your podcast series Philosophy Bites, that there has been increased interest in philosophy over the past 30 years?

There may have been the same appetite for philosophy back then, but it wasn't necessarily filled in a palatable way. When I began writing introductory philosophy books in the late 1980s, the only introductions that were readily available were The Problems of Philosophy by Bertrand Russell, which was published in 1912, and a book called Philosophy Made Simple – which was actually a good book, but people found the title off-putting because it sounded like it was dumbing the subject down. If you go into a bookshop now there would be a whole bookcase of introductory books, but 20 years ago there were surprisingly few philosophy books designed for the general reader.

When I was teaching A level [high school] philosophy students and undergraduates, I was aware that there were no books to help people make the transition from an interest in philosophy to being able to read some of the classics. So I wrote a book called Philosophy: TheBasics. Most university teachers would say you don't really need an introduction, you can just go and read Hume or Descartes or Mill. But many readers can't get through that sort of writing and gain an overview of the key points without a bit of help.