Yes we take legendary stars from the firmament and sling mud until they have a reputation black hole event and your weekly fix of satire from Friday night's comedy the border goes down the center of certain roads in our news if you have to drive into a not just going tree talk or take a cab get your passport out Mary we're going to burn this file on the outside. You can download the B.B.C. Sounds up for music radio I'm told costs to listen without limits next it's private passions and Michael Bucky's guest is the philosopher Julian Baggini. The pig that wants to be eaten do they think you'll stupid What's it all about just 3 of the eye catching the title books by my guest today Julian but Jeanie he's written 19 books in all he's the founding editor of the philosopher's magazine writes for newspapers magazines on think tanks and appears on radio and television His latest book is how the world thinks A Global History of Philosophy. Judy a NEW been described as a philosopher as philosopher but you also have a mission to liberate philosophy from any kind of ivory tower and bring it much more to the general reader so I can add to your delighted the pig that wants to be eaten York election 100 brief thought experiments has been described as mental fun sized treats on the sudoku a lot of just tell me how you came to the title where they came the ties of one of the thought experiments so I thought experiments were just little kind of imaginary scenarios that are designed to kind of focus your mind on an important for the soft core issue and most of them come from the canon or the great philosophical texts but this one was based on Douglas Adams Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy is a very famous scene there at the restaurant at the end of the universe where this genetically engineered pig kind of comes up to the diners before the meal and tries to sell them you know their lawyers I mean fattening up the cooking and everything and of course the human is disgusted by this but one of the other characters say what you'd rather eat an animal which didn't want to be eaten so the thought experiment is asking people to consider you know why it is they do or don't eat meat if you are just to sort of sum it up in 10 or 12 words yes like super large but how would you describe the meaning of philosophy. It's embarrassing to philosophers that it's so hard to sum it up in so few words they won't attempt would be is there are certain questions which we kind of need to try and answer but they can't be answered simply by looking at the facts and getting in the evidence something is always missing and all those issues the ones that philosophers are left dealing with that's why philosophy is inconclusive is the nature of the questions it's not because we're useless How do you find philosophy relates to music is it a case of the emotional versus the rational to a certain extent although of course. And that distinction itself is somewhat problematic I mean I think there is an emotional satisfaction I think a lot of people find in seeing an elegant beautiful argument in the same kind of way a lot of people I know enjoy music and they really do go in for that kind of structural things are very analytic about it and when they do ask them what they like about a particular piece of music they describe something which is actually a technical thing and I wonder if that's a rationalization they've got is that really is really what gets it but I think it possibly is there's this Thetic element to you know formal beauty order of mathematics which a lot of people do respond to a very emotional level there's no doubt that the 1st piece that you've chosen does have an emotional effect on you yes that's right this is a rebel a violin sonata a lot of the music that I've come across over the years has been somewhat by chance I mean most of the pieces will talk about are like that and I came across this one because I bought a fairly random edition of a B.B.C. Music magazine many years ago which I this wonderful compilation which is called classical jazz and this piece really stuck out for me and you know if we think about the emotion in music one often thinks of an emotion which corresponds to something you'd feel of a daily basis sad happy except for except for I think sometimes what's interesting about music is it provokes an emotional response that you can't actually put your finger on in that way you know it kind of moves you it gets under your skin a bit but I was it making you feel and you know why I don't really want to answer that it's making me feel something very distinctive and that's what makes this music quite special. Thing. Going the a. Move to gain. The I. 6 we're. John Jacques counter-offer performing the 2nd movement of the Ravel violin sonata number 2 in she major and the pianist was Jack Ruby are very interesting that period of music with the blues and jazz influenced people like to be uses Stravinsky Copeland whole series of composers as possible very exciting to find just a case which is to find that this was something that you could borrow from yeah I mean the whole era was just such a fascinating one of all the arts I think and I think my Got a favor for a visual artist as well it was a time when it was really possible to make the sort of new connections and you know there's a particular moment in history I think where you had enough behind you but enough of a blank canvas in front of you that all these really exciting experiments could come up I think is much harder to be original I mean it's very hard to do anything really different anymore did you grow up with classical music children between not a great deal I mean our household was not a particularly musical one the radio was normally only it would be Radio 2 or maybe later on Radio one and there was a few records in the House really which is strange you know why because both my parents had strong views firmaments in their families my father actually paid the accordion as a boy but I never saw him play the accordion ever in my life and my mother's father played I think it was trumpet in a bad did entertainment hotels and things but again he died before I was born I never heard it but none of them are really that into their music so you know I had to sort of pick it up as I went along often a lot later and when did philosophy creep into your life in a way it's always been there I think in the guise of that interest in if you might call ultimate questions you know I went to a Catholic primary school and you know over the years I've enjoyed the last any sort of belief in. God I think I showed her credit my father a bit with this is World mean both my parents left school essentially as soon as they could in my mother's case not because she wanted to but because mean it she had to but my dad was a bit of an autodidact and you know he developed his own interest in philosophy and although he had his own rather shall we say idiosyncratic ideas I'm sure a love interest rubbed off he encourages you to think for yourself and to take these things seriously and I do value that Aristotle has been very important to you and he wrote about what makes for a good life is music part of that good life well I must also I think although he is right about many things shared to the philosophers prejudice for thinking that the most important things was the intellect in a sense is not a surprise is it ask a butcher what's required for a good life they're probably tell you something about meat ask a philosopher they'll tell you something about the idea of reason and rationality However I was taught all did acknowledge very openly where embodied creatures we have other needs as well so there's certainly room within his framework for thinking about music as being part of a flourishing life I think one of the promise I have with most philosophers however is that the emphasis on that rational part is being core I think does tend to lead a lot of them to overlook the importance of things which you know not arguments that can be expressed in terms of rational ideas or even even words and I do think there's a lot that's what the arts are very important actually they kind of show is that a richer life can be lived in ways which don't necessarily involve philosophizing there's an overused line from Socrates you know the UN examined life is not worth living which is often used as a recruitment tool for philosophy departments looking for students and although there's a lot of truth in it I was resist the idea that the examined life is always necessarily . A kind of philosophically examined life I think in a way music art can be other ways of examining the world in yourself and your responses to it and they don't translate them into neat little philosophical theories when you listen to a piece like this next one the Brahms 4th Symphony which I'm very pleased you've chosen actually do you relate to it because of the circumstances in which you 1st enjoyed it or do you relate to it purely because of what the music speaks to you about I think it's always going to be a mixture of the 2 hasn't I mean music he's so evocative of time and place but then I think that the music that lasts always has something of its own quality as well so in this piece was interesting for me because I was in Bilbao teaching English after university and this was pre Guggenheim You know people think of Bilbao as this cultural hub now it was very limited had a beautiful theatre but it was like dark 5 days of the week and as a result you tended to just go see whatever was coming around so it's quite good from that point to it led to experimentation and I went to this concert Brahm's 4th Symphony and it was a kind of a little bit of a light bulb went off because I think if I could genuinely say as a 1st time I sort of wow I can listen to a whole symphony in really interested. Oh 8 The and. There's. 6 Luke. I mean. Music from the 2nd movement of Brahms's Symphony Number 4 the and down to Robin To charge of conducting the Scottish Chamber Orchestra. How the world thinks your most recent book Julian Baggini is quite an ambitious global history of philosophy to what extent are religion and philosophy intertwined in as much as in both we're seeking for some explanation of why we are who we are yes well that's a very interesting question because I think the conception of philosophy which holds sway most in English speaking world today in particular also parts of most of the Western world really assumes there is a kind of a distinct separation but Japan was the philosophy in Japan I found extremely interesting and it seemed to have a kind of religious character without this kind of belief in afterlife spirits and so forth and it was to do with a certain kind of you know attentiveness if you like to the transience of the world to things which didn't last forever which in a sense one of think is the opposite of the religious which used attention to the eternal but it's not actually about whether your attending to the eternal all the temporal as it were is whether you do so with that kind of you know reverent kind of attention did you continue your early relationship with God Well if you know why I did I make this kind of lame joke quite a lot which is these days people often say I'm not religious but I'm spiritual which I find rather unsatisfactory and I say I'm not spiritual but I'm religious by which I kind of mean is that I don't I don't have any belief in any other kind of you know nonphysical order soul spirits heaven whatever it might be but there's something about a kind of religious way of being in the world which I think I kind of do retain it can be hard to pin down. But it's partly to do with a certain kind of moral seriousness about things a certain kind of modesty that we can't know for sure ourselves certain things are going to be beyond our understanding and also a kind of reverence if you like but my reverence isn't for a higher power it's kind of for for life and for nature and for the world so it's a kind of way of being you know rather than the set of beliefs so the idea that music can possibly great architecture could in itself be a religion to many people is makes sense to you I think when you really are moved by a piece of music I don't know if you agree with this but one has a sense of something which is you know greater than oneself in a way it has it has A and part of that feeling for me is also the feeling that you are experiencing something which is in time and is therefore about to go as a part of the profundity of the experience for me is rooted it is impermanence so I'm not getting a glimpse of the eternal When I listen to music in a way I'm getting rather a much more acute glimpse of the temporal Szymanowski next and what's fascinating here is the way he's built on the traditional shop our house and these melodies these and it is a very beautiful here with a guy discovered this purely by chance in the car one day of flipping around on to Radio 3 and it was computers composed with a week and at this point in his life he became very interested in the people in music of his native Poland and I think he doesn't really successful with this music he takes something which is a folk melody and we're in a classical idiom create something really rather special I think. That. The poor. Ever. The the. The 1st. The book the board and the on. Board the the as well as the book bag. RINGBACK Or with. The board. The an. Old. Old board. Of. The of. The of the of the earth but as the backbone. That sounds to me finish the difficult to play not necessarily because of the technical thing of hitting the notes but it's quite sort of complex and to make it kind of seeing as it seems to be quite an achievement Yeah because it combines a slightly jacket rhythm with that with of both melody and yeah we heard Mark Andre am lamb performing the 12th of Szymanowski is 20 mazurkas your partner Julian but Jean is the site with their list and 10 year mark are up and for 5 years you wrote a newspaper agony aunt and uncle column together that you call the shrink on the stage How did you go about solving readers' problems already just give each other more of Europe but we didn't we didn't respond to readers promise directly people suggested issues they had with their lives we tend to kind of think about a lot of the problems of living in our in a kind of an overly sort of medicalized way that the goal is to try to kind of you know get rid of the make yourself feel better and move on and just get on and being happy in a way we're all supposed to be and what we wanted to do was have a column in which we could address some of the issues of living in a way that we felt I suppose did justice to the complexity of things and didn't sort of just claim that you could get rid of these problems I think a lot of people needlessly suffer because I have an issue they have a problem and they believe it should be completely soluble and actually sort of realizing this is not completely soluble but that doesn't necessarily prevent you from living a good life is a huge liberation to people so I think a lot of it I think was rushed trying to get people to be more content about living with their problems and discontents obviously solving the ones that can be solved but being realistic you can't just wish them all away you know a good life isn't not an arm problem free life so mortality would be a good example and then again this is something again which I thought. The Japanese way of thinking I say the Japanese way of thinking a way of thinking very dominant Japanese thought very useful Japanese philosophy seems to me very good at mixing the between the sweet seeing those things as being inseparable life is always both and so the whole thing about the cherry blossom and watching the cherry blossom fall is that you appreciating this beauty knowing that it won't last and so it's the 2 things together and I think that capacity to hold the bit in the sweet together is extremely important because a lot of music is like that actually we don't listening to sad music a lot of the time troubling music music which is not our beat but there's often something really beautiful music and so in that sense the music can be a lesson in the bitter in the sweet can come together now Michael Nyman to music which we're coming to next is probably best known through his film using but you've actually chosen something which is not a soundtrack Well that's right I mean I came to his music as I think most people did through films drafts of his contract here certainly in the Cook the Thief The wife of his lover were the 2 that I kind of 1st heard but there's something about his music which I find it extremely kind of moving now he's quite a mathematical composer and if you read his sleeve notes is very much about you can hear it's about patterns he's influenced by said Emerson minimalism about it he's a minimalist composer himself and he out of this I think I was a very emotionally charged music and I think this one is my favorite piece of his it's actually written for a dance and it has a real energy to it but also the quartet format quartets trios. Pub cost by searching for Private Passions on B.B.C. Songs joining the Seems to be no end to the growth of the market in self-help books on sale today when you get a bit fed up when self-help Moscow raids as philosophy. Where I find myself getting a little bit frustrated I think is that when a philosophy is just put in the service of standard self-help gold as it were because it seems to me that a philosophical approach to living one the good life isn't just telling you what you can do in order to get what you want to feel happy or something is getting you to question those goals and a question about whether or not these reasons really are things you should be striving for so when people say you know if you want to get over you know feeding risible then here's a little bit of Schopenhauer or take as a like a prescription that I do find a little bit. Annoying Having said that I probably should be bolder that to be honest because you know anything can be taken in used for different ends and if someone could make something practical useful to someone out of philosophy why shouldn't they have perhaps you could teach people to enjoy being miserable Well you join me miserable Yeah I mean there's something to be said for that I mean I'd . Seriously I don't think philosophers are necessarily any more or less miserable than other people whether people are basically jolly or miserable seems to be largely temperamental thing actually and of course you know you can go up and down in life and there are forms of misery and depression which are just debilitating or awful and no one should suffer from them but you know a lot of people in our society cheerful happy people but that's not a problem for them they have things which make them want to get up in the morning they have things which motivate them and I just think there's this almost like pressure now for people to be upbeat happy jolly Smiley Well you know why should we it's a bloody awful world in lots of ways and life is tough but you don't have to be either you can be have a very rich life and you can value your life you can value other people without necessarily being cheerful Well this all could relate very easily to ageing and denial of ageing well there's a. Of aging is something which I think our society's got a real problem with you know I'm just recently turned 50 and why not just accept the fact that we're getting on and I think it's important because knowing that time is short is extremely valuable so many people it takes a kind of a brush with death for them to realize that life is short they should get on with it and you know if you're able to kind of get a sense of that without having to have the pressure of death or with death then you're very very lucky you know you brought her 1st to private passions to them because we heard music just now which came to you in a sense by way of film and the next piece has come from the world of video games and increasingly platform for many composers so are you a video gamer and is this how you came across the music Absolutely not no I came across this again by chance I did what they call University Challenge the professionals which is where they get people who graduates with certain universities together and we competed in the last series and University College London and I had a teammate Jessica Curry and Jessica composes music for video games and this fascinated me because I hadn't really thought about this because I don't play games I hadn't really even considered the fact that they have to create music for them so I went along with Jessica very kindly invited me to a performance of her music with a live video game in Restore and I had no idea what's going on the screen but the music I thought was really fascinating so I bought it and I've been playing it quite regularly ever since. Music from Jessica Carr is soundtrack to the 2008 video game Esther we talked about the closeness in some ways of philosophy and religion is that closeness there in terms of philosophy encrypt it well I find again this is something which should endlessly fascinated by the creative process I think the way in which people typically think about artistic creativity is of a somewhat kind of mysterious process which involves a lot of this sort of unconscious never thing and opening your your mind and people think about philosophy as being a kind of a rational thing where you exercise your conscious mind on solving the problems I actually think the there probably is not as much difference between those 2 things as no you're absolutely right now we're going to move on to a band whose creativity has fascinated you for quite a time now well talk talk their 1st album was quite mainstream kind of poppy new romantic album but they with each album they developed extraordinarily and I did get very interested with them the 2 main creative forces in the band with Mark Hollis and a guy called Tim free screen and they created this rather very distinctive music and then they kind of both disappeared Mark Hollis did a set of album winners then disappeared off the scene to him for his screen is very occasionally done some very personal solo projects and people who have a kind of a real focus who really know what they're looking for and are not interested in just simply doing more work if it doesn't fit their own high ideals I find that incredibly admirable. Lose. Them. Subtle. Come up. Uncategorizable of the that particular piece really since the 1st minute I don't think you know where they're going to listen to like some contemporary jazz contemporary classical or you know it's a when the electric guitar comes in that kind of tell the kind of belongs to rock but does it really I mean Steve Reich's done music with electric guitars Well I actually thought specially the opening that you refer to was very much the sonic landscape the sound world of if you like just could carry Well yeah I think there's a lot of these sort of good to be music it is sort of about atmospheres moods and so forth and there is a lot of where a lot of progressive music for WANT to a better word is is clearly very clever and very intellectual but it can often leave me cold you need something which has for WANT to a better word a bit of soul you know and can I put my finger on what's the difference between something which has sold for me a dozen maybe it's not it has although it doesn't it's what it moves me on or talk talk with the rainbow from their 988 album Spirit of Eden. You've changed an pieces that on the whole Julian But Jeanne have come to you through serendipity. And I've also been surprised by the powerful emotional effect that music has on you and the passion you clearly feel the music you love Again not something one immediately thinks of with the cool rational world of the philosopher So how do you discover there's this last piece that is also a chance encounter Yes this is perhaps one of the most straightforward least of lyrical pretty tunes show you say this was again in Bilbao Funnily enough it was the dance performance and the program didn't tell me what this piece of music was they they said the piece is music by voice and for quite a long time I thought I had the melody in my head in the key theme when I tried to whistle it to people but it didn't work but believing this might be the piece I got hold of a copy and it wasn't the piece but I really do enjoy it and as I say it's actually quite simple piece of music in some ways the emotional Paul here is very on the surface and sometimes there's a very lovely pieces of music which are extremely accessible and new here than the 1st time and the test of them is whether they still sound beautiful when you listen to them the 20th or the 40th time and this music I think it was going to put you in a fairly good mood at least temporarily the 1st movement of the Serenade in E. By a diversion going on this note Julian of Jeannie may I say thank you very much thank you Michael. Christopher were in green conducting the 1st movement of divorce string serenaded me the final choice of Michael Bach his guest on Private Passions Julian Baggini the producer was Jane Greenwood and the program was aloft as production for B.B.C. Radio 3 you can find full details of all today's music choices on B.B.C. Sounds we can also download a free podcast of the program and many others in the series and Private Passions returns next Sunday at midday when Michael's guest is the comedian Rachael Paris B.B.C. Radio 39293 F.M. On digital radio online and on B.B.C. Sounds it's 1 o'clock time for the news read by me Debbie Ross the papers described Catholic priests who are guilty of child sex abuse as the tools of Satan he was speaking at the end of a Vatican conference on tackling paedophilia among the clergy Pope Francis promised to spend no effort in bringing abuses to justice the environment secretary Michael Gove has called on conservative colleagues not to delay breaks it despite a warning from 3 cabinet ministers that they could back such a move rather than allow the U.K. To leave the E.U. Without a deal was to go said that if BRICS it were postponed there was a danger of another referendum which would do real damage to British politics.