This interview is from “The Browser”
Philosophy is sometimes assumed to be a dry, academic subject but, in reality, is anything but. A philosophy professor tells us how his subject is at least as much about how we live, love and relate to each other.
Your own book, The Virtues of our Vices makes, I think, a brilliant case for applying philosophy to everyday living, because, as you point out in the introduction, apparently trivial things – like a colleague being rude to us – have a much bigger impact on us on a day-to-day basis than ruminations on the meaning of life.
A lot of philosophy concerns fairly theoretical issues – the correct definition of concepts like justice, the relation between mind and body, or the nature of the soul. These are problems that have been inherited down the years from Plato and Aristotle, Descartes and Kant. There is another tradition which sees philosophy as a reflection on life. This includes discussion of ethical problems that we face, but also focuses on the way we conduct ourselves, the way we live, the way we relate to each other. I see my book as a contribution to that tradition. Not so much an attempt to solve complex metaphysical problems, or problems in the theory of knowledge or the philosophy of mind, but a reflection on the way we live.
Do you feel this side of philosophy has been neglected?
I do. In one of the books I’ve chosen, The Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy, William Irvine makes this very explicit. In ancient times, Plato and Aristotle and other philosophers did deal with theoretical problems, but the Greeks and the Romans understood philosophy as something that people had and used in everyday life, and there were competing schools of philosophy.
Yes, I love that bit in the book, where Irvine describes how as an ancient Greek you had to choose a school of philosophy for your child – whether to send them to the Cynic school, or the Stoic school, or the Sceptic school – just like today we might grapple with whether to send them to private or public school.
Yes. So that tradition of philosophy, as a reflection on life and a guide to living, has never died out. You can trace it through Plato, Epicurus, the Stoics, Augustine, Pascal, Rousseau, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Thoreau all the way to the present day. But in the past few hundred years, it’s very much taken a back seat while the more heavy duty metaphysics, theory of knowledge, philosophy of mind, political philosophy and grand theories of morality in moral philosophy, have tended to take centre stage. When you look at a standard introduction to philosophy or to ethics, it’ll usually be about these great theoretical problems. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with discussing those big theoretical problems, I just think it’s a shame that the tradition of philosophy as a reflection on life and a guide to life has been marginalised. Click link below to read full interview.
http://thebrowser.com/interviews/emrys-westacott-on-philosophy-and-everyday-living?page=1