We live in an era of emerging technologies. Every day brings new headlines about advances in gene editing, machine learning or quantum computing, to name a few. We can admire the gadgetry and try to get our heads around the science, but the most fundamental questions about these issues still belong to the millennia-old disciplines of logic and critical thought.
The more dazzling the technical progress, the more philosophical considerations it raises. Many of the questions with which we’re now confronted – regarding privacy, the architecture of choice, profiling, bias and (perhaps, eventually) the moral status of machines themselves – are not solely technical matters.
The pharmaceutical industry and university research scientists can develop vaccines to fight pandemics. But who should be given those vaccines, and at what price? The car industry is making rapid advances in driverless cars, and the defence industry in autonomous vehicles. But if a driverless car has to “choose” whether to swerve left or right, if the drone has to “choose” which target to hit, where does the moral liability rest? Who should police the new global platforms for human interaction and take responsibility for the effects on our health, happiness and social cohesion?
And yet, even as philosophy becomes more relevant to the questions posed by our changing world, it is under pressure as an academic discipline. It’s not all bad; in schools, A-level philosophy is increasing in popularity, though most sixth-formers are exposed to philosophy only indirectly, via religious studies (a blend that is almost as irksome as discovering philosophy in the self-help section of book shops). But at university level, the squeeze is on. The University of Kent, which has closed its philosophy department, is a grim warning to teachers and students of the most fundamental academic discipline.
It was here in the New Statesman, in 1956, that the scientist and novelist CP Snow famously worried about the emergence of two cultures – that intellectual life had become divided between science and the humanities. Sneery humanities types laughed about the cultural illiteracy of the expanding scientific and technical classes, yet struggled to define basic scientific terms such as “acceleration” or “mass”. Seven decades on, Snow’s concern remains pertinent. We need these domains to cooperate in harmony and that requires people who can operate comfortably in both.
Although philosophical issues and assumptions tend to be overlooked, they’re always lurking in the undergrowth. Every other field is underpinned by questions about how we should think about fundamental ideas: in maths, are mathematical proofs discoveries or inventions? In literature, is the author’s intention key to understanding a text? In science, what distinguishes real science, such as astronomy, from pseudoscience, like astrology? In history, what counts as a relevant fact or event, and why? And yet philosophy is not among the 60-plus GCSE subjects potentially available for students to choose from.
Philosophy remains a broad-based subject. There’s ethics, philosophy of mind, philosophical logic, aesthetics and so on. But traditionally, philosophy covered a much wider variety of what we now consider separate fields; in Ancient Greece, for example, physics was a branch of philosophy. In his day, Isaac Newton was “a natural philosopher” rather than “a scientist”. But slowly, as areas of inquiry opened up to scientific scrutiny, they became unmoored from the mothership, setting sail to establish colonies of their own.
It follows that what’s left, philosophical questions, are almost by definition not amenable to empirical investigation. Ironically, “empiricism” – the idea that genuine knowledge can only be acquired through our senses – is itself a philosophical stance. Empiricism has been a dominant strain within British philosophy and suits our nation’s no-nonsense self-image. Empiricism is solid red brick, as opposed to those fancy rococo constructs found on the continent.
Even so, outside philosophy there’s an instinctive and deeply ingrained suspicion of the discipline. British philosophers have rarely attained the kind of status they’ve achieved elsewhere. In the 20th century, the activist aristocrat Bertrand Russell was the nearest we got to a philosophical sage. Today, we have no prominent public philosophers. In France, the coiffured, open-shirted Bernard-Henri Lévy is so renowned that he’s referred to as “BHL” and called upon to comment on the pressing issues of the day. But, when war broke out in Ukraine, no BBC Today producer thought, “I know who the listener needs to hear on this: Alain de Botton.”
Philosophy’s enduring image problem was summed up by the cab driver who recognised Bertrand Russell on his rear seat and asked his eminent passenger: “Well, Lord Russell, what’s it all about?” Russell didn’t answer, perhaps because it wasn’t a genuine philosophical question – only the sort of vague and unanswerable puzzle that people think philosophers ponder.
In March, the British Philosophical Association launched the campaign Philosophy Matters, with the aim of promoting philosophy as an activity in universities, schools and in prisons, with two weeks of events across the UK. The message from the campaign was that, though sometimes perceived as heavy-going, philosophy is not (usually) an abstruse topic, explored only by philosophers for philosophers. It has real, practical applications.
The most obvious of these is in running the country: the PPE (philosophy, politics and economics) degree at Oxford is a standard qualification for the House of Commons. A recent gathering in parliament was attended by a smattering of MPs and lords, including David Blunkett, who spoke about how he drew on philosophy in the wake of 9/11, when, as home secretary, he was confronted with competing claims of human rights and national security. The writer and producer John Lloyd (Blackadder, QI, Spitting Image) recalled that during his early forties, in a nihilistic pit of despair, the discovery of philosophy saved his life. The peer and former Green Party leader Natalie Bennett is establishing an all-party parliamentary group on philosophy, which will be set up within two months. “Philosophy should be an essential part of schooling,” she said, in part “as a lever to help in moving our schools away from exam-factory methods of grim drilling in facts to be regurgitated”.
We live in utilitarian times (Jeremy Bentham would approve), when academic subjects feel the need to justify themselves by the impact they have – defined, reductively, in monetary terms. Does it lead to gainful employment? Will it pay the bills? As the US secretary of state Marco Rubio once bluntly put it, “We need more welders and less philosophers.”
Utilitarian, but philistine. Should enquiry into the deepest questions we face – what is truth? What is the good life? What is beauty? What is the relationship between the mind and the body? Is morality objective? Do we have free will? – really require cashing out in pounds and pence?
Even if it does, philosophy can easily meet that challenge. In A History of Western Philosophy (1945), Bertrand Russell wrote, “Hitler is an outcome of Rousseau; Roosevelt and Churchill, of Locke.” This was a bit silly, but it’s true that we live in a world shaped by ideas. Locke influenced the US Declaration of Independence and the constitution, advocating, among other things, for a separation of powers. Immanuel Kant is a key figure in the development of human rights. John Stuart Mill helped to propel the cause of female suffrage. The Australian philosopher Peter Singer, recently retired from Princeton, is the father of the modern animal rights movement.
An honest and complete ledger contains negatives. Only a few communist countries remain, but for part of the 20th century, around a third of the world’s population lived through a disastrous experiment in government, inspired by the philosopher Karl Marx.
Beyond politics, it’s the effect of philosophy on science and technology that is the least known and perhaps most surprising. Einstein several times acknowledged the debt he owed to the 18th-century Scotsman David Hume, “whose treatise on understanding I studied with eagerness and admiration shortly before finding relativity theory”.
From the beginning of the 20th century, philosophers and logicians such as Bertrand Russell, Alonzo Church, Gerhard Gentzen, Saul Kripke, Alfred Tarski and Alan Turing have made major contributions to logic, which in turn has been fundamental to the development of computer science – so much so that David Pym, professor of information, logic and security at UCL, says that “it’s very unhelpful to distinguish between computer scientists, mathematicians, and philosophers in topics related to logic”.
The philosophers attending another Philosophy Matters event, held at Senate House in central London, give a glimpse into the remarkable range of research philosophers engage with. One philosopher is working with the NHS on equality of access and moral decision-making, while another, Heather Widdows – whose research focuses on the demands of beauty – is writing about Instagram photos. There’s a philosopher specialising in terrorism and extremism; a philosopher exploring “taste”; philosophers in AI; and a Glasgow-based philosopher, Fiona Macpherson, studying illusion and hallucination. An emeritus professor, MM McCabe, goes into prisons to discuss philosophical ideas with inmates. A young philosopher, James DiFrisco, has been brought in by the Crick Institute for medical research to lead a study group. The aim is to help biologists clarify their research: for example, in evolutionary terms, what is a trait? Where does one trait end and another begin, and how is it that the same trait can be present in very different species? Paul Nurse, the Nobel Prize-winning geneticist and chief executive of the institute, reports that his colleagues “have really profited” from having an in-house philosopher.
It’s notable that none of these philosophers is a lone ranger. They cooperate with neuroscientists and experimental psychologists, policymakers and health workers, lawyers, sociologists and soldiers. A report in 2024 tentatively concluded that “studying philosophy can make people better thinkers”. But although philosophy is a piece of every puzzle, it is not a body of knowledge. The essential point to grasp is that it is a skill. The skill of applying reason and logic, of assessing arguments and applying conceptual clarity. In a world that is changing at an unprecedented pace, with an information ecosystem drenched in distortion and fabrication, philosophy matters more than ever.
David Edmonds’ “Philosophy Matters” column appears regularly in the New Statesman
[See also: What is Trump thinking?]
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This article appears in the 10 Apr 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Spring Special 2025