How can you make philosophy accessible to everyone without stripping it of essential depth and complexity? Where can philosophy take hold in diet and everyday activities?

Julian Baggini is a philosopher, journalist and the author of over 20 books about philosophy. His latest are How to Think Like a Philosopher: Twelve Key Principles for More Humane, Balanced, and Rational Thinking, How the World Eats: A Global Food Philosophy, and The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten: 100 Experiments for the Armchair Philosopher.

Greg and Julian discuss making philosophy accessible to everyone, and Julian’s latest works. Julian discusses the importance of epistemic virtue, cognitive empathy, and the challenges of integrating philosophical thinking into everyday life. They examine the role of attention in good thinking, the merits and drawbacks of various food ethics movements, and the balance between technophilia and technophobia, even coining a new term for practical wisdom in technology use.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Episode Quotes:

System change beats consumer choice

40:38: We should be a little less neurotic about, Is this clean, dirty? Is this good, bad? Try and do the right thing. But actually, it is a system change that is most important. And so the most important thing you could do as an individual is influence organizations and things you are around with. What about your school? What is your school doing for food? I mean, crikey, I am in France at the moment, and I just got the local newsletter from the school. The local schools here—they have a local chef. They give a good chef. They favor local sourcing. They are 30% organic in their ingredients. They spend three euros a day on the food for the kids. And it is—wow, that is great. Right now, in a lot of English British schools, it is terrible, and that is partly because they do not have the resources for it. So, you know, you have got a school—get your school buying the right stuff and feeding the right stuff. That is going to affect like several hundred kids, which is much more than you can affect with your shopping basket.

Why attentiveness matters in philosophy

58:15: Attentiveness is important because I think in some debates, they become scholastic in the sense that a question arises in philosophy, it gets formulated, and people go after the answers, but people are not paying attention as to why we are asking the question in the first place.

Why thinking should be a team sport

43:17: So the so-called cognitive failures we have, it shows how stupid we are. Bad we are at abstract thought. Well, that's when we try and do things privately by ourselves, and I think in general, yeah, absolutely. Thinking with others—so this has become my mantra. I actually got a fridge magnet made with this on it: Think for yourself, not by yourself. Think for yourself is important. Do not just accept what you are told.

Rethinking what it means to think well

05:20: People often think that good thinking is a technical matter. You get your training in logic; you get to analyze whether a statement is fallacious, whether the conclusion follows from the premises, et cetera, et cetera—all of which are useful skills, to be sure. But there is a whole other side of good thinking, which is to do with what we call these epistemic virtues. It describes the whole attitude you bring to your thinking.

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Northern Ireland, Then & Now