I just received the weekly Melvyn Bragg
In Our Time newsletter (email) which directed me to the podcast of the BBC Radio 4 edition of
In our Time that was broadcast on 1st January. This turned out to be quite a coincidence because the programme was titled
The Consolation of Philosophy and consisted of philosophers discussing Boethius’ book in connection with our current economic fortunes, the subject of my last blog post. They also discussed Albert Camus writing about suicide which was also the subject of one of my recent posts.
The aristocratic A.C. Grayling, one of the contributors, is one of my favourite writers. I have read nine of his books and would particularly recommend The Choice of Hercules and Against All Gods, though the latter is very short. He wrote a series of books, starting with The Meaning of Things and progressing through The Mystery of, The Reason of, The Heart of and The Form of Things. These books consist of short, self contained monologues on a wide variety of subjects. I have also read a book by one of the other contributors, Roger Scruton’s An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Philosophy, though his writing is too conservative for my tastes.
Grayling also wrote a book on Ludwig Wittgenstein (pictured in Swansea in 1947), the archetypal introverted genius. One of my favourite anecdotes about Wittgenstein, which Dawkins mentioned in The God Delusion, is when he asked his students why people used to think that the Sun went around the Earth. When they gave the predictable response, he then asked, “and what would it have looked like if the Earth had gone around the Sun?”. Think about it.
Those who know me are acquainted with my frequent short lived fads and one of my recent obsessions was Myers-Briggs Personality Tests. These tests were developed from the personality type ideas of Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung - the Aryan Christ as one book dubbed him. Dawkins thinks that Jung was a looney who thought that a book could spontaneously explode, but I think his ideas are quite interesting. Maybe I’m just a sucker for psychobabble.
Anyway, Jung thought that there were four main functions of consciousness, two perceiving functions: sensation and intuition and two judging functions: thinking and feeling. Further, these two functions are modified by two main attitude types: extraversion and introversion. Now, it’s not that you are either an introvert or extrovert. Rather, you have a dominant function which is either introvert or extrovert. Actually, I might be mixing this up with Keirsey temperament sorter or Socionics (which is the more controversial version of MBTI popular in Russia).
I have done lots of MBTI tests and I always come out as INTJ. NT Types are known as Rationals. So my dominant function is introverted intuition and my secondary function is extroverted thinking. No wonder people think I’m cold as ice.
The founder of the British Humanist Association, H.J. Blackham, died this week. Believe it or not, this methuselah of Humansim was 105 years old. Blackham was one of the originators of the worldwide Humanist movement and that he was still alive in 2009 underlines the fact that organisations to promote ethics and the good life without any religious basis are a relatively recent phenomenon. I bought a copy of one of Blackham’s books on eBay a few years ago. Simply titled “Humanism”, it was first published in 1968, the year of my birth. Voltaire said “One owes respect to the living, to the dead one only owes the truth” and to be honest, with the exception of some memorable quotes, I don’t think his writing was particularly readable when compared to contemporary Humanists such as Alfred Ayer or Bertrand Russell. However, it is clear that Blackham was instrumental in bringing Humanists together in the 1950s and 1960s and that he played a huge part in elucidating what constituted the Humanist view. The part of his book that I found most memorable was the first sentence which sums up a minimum criteria for considering oneself a Humanist:
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